


The Strangers

by twistedservice



Series: The Fabled [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Demons, Developing Relationship, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Oops, Past Relationship(s), Supernatural Elements, a lot of it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-15
Updated: 2018-12-15
Packaged: 2019-09-18 06:13:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16989564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistedservice/pseuds/twistedservice
Summary: Fate is not a slope. It’s an edge a thousand feet tall, with nothing at the bottom.Are you going to step off it?—The immortal’s guide to stepping off the edge of Fate.(And what happens, when the fall has no foreseeable end.)





	The Strangers

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, you read that word count right.

 

Blair doesn’t hate the sun as much as he lets on.

Honestly, the sun is the one thing that makes him feel warm. It’s the one thing that can penetrate right to the heart of his bones, a heat inside him that he hasn’t properly felt since he died.

It’s rare, to feel like that. The sunlight still burns his eyes, and there’s no way to stand in one spot for too long without feeling like he’s going to burst into flames, but it’s nice to feel like a human being. And it would be easier, if he and Celia hadn’t filled their freezer with blood bags two weeks ago and then got yelled at by Dimara when she discovered them.

Human, but only sometimes.

But the blood makes him feel alive too.

He can almost operate like a normal human being. People who don’t look too closely would think he passes as one, providing he’s not starving himself. It’s then that it gets troublesome – when the eyes start to go black, red where white should be.

He has to admit – Celia’s idea wasn’t the worst thing he’s ever heard. He has a pretty much on-going supply of blood now, until it inevitably runs out. But there’s plenty of time before that, and until then it actually feels like he can exist and not worry about it. It’s always there, in the back of his mind. A fear that things go south again. That the bloodlust takes over.

It’s been a long time. Too long. He doesn’t remember much of the early years in being feral, except for the killing, of living almost permanently covered in someone else’s blood. And he doesn’t know when he came out of it, either. But he remembers that feeling of being grateful, when he hadn’t cared at all during it. He could live again, operate like a normal person again.

But that was over two hundred years ago, when he was still afraid to go near someone for too long, when he still wondered if someone he talked to would be dead by the end of their conversation.

And going from that fear to this is terrifying in itself.

They should be terrified of him. The others would have every right to be. That’s the typical reaction, for someone that just shows up, invades your life, and then kills half a dozen people a few weeks later in front of a burning house. It was only half a dozen because Nadir got the other half – he could have done it all himself.

If this is what a normal reaction looks like when it comes to someone like him, then color him shocked.

Kelsea’s the one that forced him outside in the first place, after dinner. He had half a mind to stay in the house but everyone else trickled out there, even more so now that Rooke can follow, and he had little to no choice in the matter.

He won’t lie – it’s pretty damn nice, having everyone outside. Especially because Rooke looks like someone just handed him the world on a silver platter every time he winds up more than two steps away from the porch, which Tanis basically did. She gave him a lot, just by getting him out of the house. She gave them everything in association with it; a sense of happiness that hadn’t been there before, a comfort in the middle of the scorching sun that would otherwise drive them all back in.

It feels like that, every day except for today. And even this evening would feel like that too, if there wasn’t something hanging over their heads.

Literally, and figuratively.

Blair chances a glance at the mere shadow of the full moon. It’s not nearly dark enough yet to make it out in it’s entirety, but in a few hours, it’ll be dark. They’ll be on the fast track to midnight.

And Vance will be on the even faster track to no longer being Vance.

He’s not sure who coaxed him outside. Kelsea, most likely. Vance has hardly talked to anyone all day, apparently convinced he’s going to change prematurely and maim someone before the sun even goes down. And once this happens, that’s it for him. He’ll change every month. He’ll change whenever he wants to, once he gains control over it. And even when he doesn’t want to.

Blair’s been watching him burn a hole through the same patch of grass for nearly forty-five minutes now. He’s pacing endlessly, half actual genuine nerves and half his body’s inability to sit still. It knows something’s happening.

Kelsea’s sitting in the grass in front of him, Rooke at her side, and while they had both been pretty adamant about watching him it seems as if they’ve given up.

It’s kind of the only thing Blair can focus on.

It’s different, obviously, but he knows what it feels like. That restlessness, the feeling of something unfamiliar rising inside you. He doesn’t remember who he was, during that first bit, and he doubts Vance will remember much of tonight either. It’s all about control, and it takes a while to gain it. Blair wishes, naively, that they could just skip all the bullshit and get to a few months from now, when Vance isn’t a wolf three times any of their size that’s considering eating them.

He’ll still be a wolf three times their size, of course. Just maybe not one with the intent of eating one of them for a snack.

But tonight’s going to be bad. They’re all avoiding talking about it, even thinking about it.

Dimara included, apparently. She’s sitting next to him on the porch and staring the same way he is. He stares at the side of her face for a full minute before she turns to look at him.

“Are we seriously going to chain him up in the cellar?”

“Do you have a better idea?”

Dimara makes a frustrated noise. “No. That’s the annoying part.”

They do have an alternative. They let him turn outside, where the two options are he runs off and kill someone, or he runs off and someone kills _him_. Neither options are preferable. Especially not to Vance.

“Kelsea wants to stay with him.”

“If Kelsea wants to watch him break every bone in his body in screaming agony when he literally changes into an animal, she’s welcome to.”

“You wouldn’t actually let her stay in there,” Dimara says flatly, which he should have just admitted out-loud before she could bother to call him out on it. Kelsea staying in the cellar with him is going to lead to Kelsea in four different pieces, no matter what she thinks.

Like he said – the wolf they’re getting tonight won’t be Vance. He won’t care who Kelsea is.

He won’t care who any of them are.

Vance actually pauses long enough in his pacing to look up at the sky, and then he turns around to look at him. Blair raises his eyebrows.

“You wanna go inside?”

There’s no way anything close to the real thing is happening yet, but Vance isn’t going to know the difference until it _is_ happening. None of them will, honestly. It’s not like he’s ever witnessed any of this, ever wanted to.

Kelsea reaches up and grabs Vance’s hand, stopping it from swinging back and forth. But he still nods. Pulls himself gently from her grasp before he makes a beeline for the house, up the stairs right past them. Blair doesn’t have to turn to know he’s headed for the basement.

Dimara sighs and gets up.

“Where are you going?” he asks.

“Well, he’s not going to chain himself up.”

“I thought you were against that.”

“I’m against getting torn to pieces by a werewolf,” she corrects him.

“So was he,” he points out. Still happened anyway. Vance didn’t go out that night with the intention that he wouldn’t ever be going back home. He definitely didn’t imagine that a month later he’d be getting shackled in the cellar of an unfamiliar house in the hopes that he won’t be able to get to any of them.

Of course Dimara’s going to do it, too. Kelsea is still looking after him, long gone now, frowning. This is going to be the ugliest thing he’s seen in a while, excluding finding him in the first place.

He stands up and brushes his hands off. “You guys going to help?”

Kelsea scrambles to her feet, oddly fast, but Rooke stays sitting in the grass. He can’t say he blames him for that one. The choice of staying outside when he hasn’t in such a long time versus chaining up one of his newly found friends. Blair knows what option he would pick, if he really had a choice in the matter.

None of them are going to force Rooke inside. He’s the exception to the rule.

“Wish us luck,” he mutters, and Rooke turns his head. Kelsea skirts past him into the house.

“I’ll come help in a bit.”

Blair’s a little surprised, by that. Like he said – he wouldn’t be helping unless he knew there was no other way. But Rooke offers him a tight smile, before he turns back to look at the treeline. Someone should come out here and sit with him, but Blair already knows that everyone’s in the basement. He can hear all of them down there, feel the anxiety brimming, the odd rhythm of everyone’s heartbeats, all faster than normal.

He goes inside, closes the door, and heads for the cellar.

—

—

—

“What time is it?”

“11:56,” Nadir says quietly, and Blair resists the urge to rip his own hair out.

It feels like it’s been three days. Dimara hadn’t exactly gone to town on chaining Vance up the second he got into the basement, but it was only a matter of hours before they actually had to.

Blair genuinely doesn’t feel good about this.

The cellar is small, only a few meters long on each side. The door is old and flimsy, wooden because they didn’t think or have time to fix it. They spent enough time screwing plates into the concrete walls so that they _could_ chain him up, because that seemed like priority number one at the time. Shackles at the end of all four limbs, Vance looks like someone they just kidnapped off the street and decided to torture.

Which isn’t really all that far off.

He’s only started to look worse with every passing hour. Him being jittery was bound to happen, but he wasn’t stopped shaking since they locked him up. Hands clenched into painfully tight fists, sweat gathering at his temples. While he was once rocking back and forth on his feet, movement limited, now he’s still. He hasn’t looked at them in a while, head up against the wall.

“You guys can go,” he says quietly, but his voice is tense.

Blair’s already forced everyone across the basement and halfway up the stairs, just in case. He’s still here because he feels like he has to be, Nadir’s still here because she doesn’t really seem all that concerned about herself, and Kelsea’s still here because she’s Kelsea.

“When _should_ we leave?” Kelsea asks quietly. He’s forced her to stand behind him, because he doesn’t trust her anywhere else.

“You’re leaving the second something starts to happen.”

“I’d prefer if you all left then,” Vance says, the closest he’s come to a plea in a while.

“Just think of it this way,” Nadir says. “Blair could probably take you, if something happened. And if you were to kill me—”

“I’d really not like to kill anyone tonight,” he says weakly, and Blair wishes he had the ability to make a joke about that right now. What Nadir said isn’t exactly a joke, sure, but she seems very sure about that, for someone who doesn’t technically know that they’re guaranteed to come back every time.

Nadir’s watch ticks over to midnight. Something’s bound to happen soon. Celia and Rory both lean around the stairs to look at them through the half open door in unison, and he shrugs back at them. Nothing to tell.

When something starts to happen, he sure as shit won’t have to tell anyone.

“It hurts,” Vance says quietly.

“What hurts?” Kelsea asks.

Vance turns around, enough to lean back against the wall and slide down to the ground. All the chains swing and clank together, but eventually he ends up there with his legs awkwardly twisted beneath him. His face contorts in pain, fingers digging harshly into his knees, and it’s only a matter of time until it’s claws there instead, until he’s in danger of not only hurting one of them, but himself.

“Everything,” he decides on, a while later. He still looks like he’s in agony, jaw clenched, almost like he’s struggling not to scream.

“Okay, go sit with everyone else,” he tells Kelsea, and she makes a face.

“Nothing’s happening yet.”

Not yet. But he kind of wants to spare her even from the beginning of it, because he can only imagine how horrific even that’s going to be. He knows what it’s like, to be in that kind of agony, but starvation is different from this. It’s a different kind of pain. At least he still had himself.

“Go,” he repeats, and after a moment she backs up towards the door, arms wrapped around herself. He watches her walk all the way back to the stairs, struggling not to turn back. Tanis, sitting on the first landing, pats her arm as she walks by, but there’s little comfort in it.

“Are you really willing to stay in here?” he asks, and Nadir looks at him.

“For how long?”

“Long as we can.”

“Like I said, it doesn’t matter if he kills me.”

Blair thinks it would matter. More to Vance than to her, judging by her expression. Vance doesn’t even interject that time, doesn’t even ask them to leave. He’s got his head buried in his knees. The shaking is worse than before.

It’ll definitely matter, if Vance kills him. He has no doubt that a newly changed werewolf would have the strength, and the desire, to rip his heart directly out of his chest.

That still doesn’t stop him from creeping closer, even despite the fact that his brain’s telling him to run the opposite way. He crouches down in front of him, and Vance lifts his head up only enough to look at him, barely.

“Just calm down.”

“You don’t think I’m trying?”

“Just think – few hours, and this will all be over.”

“Until the next time it happens.”

Alright, Blair was trying to be optimistic for Vance’s sake, but it appears as if that tactic has already flown out the window. Vance’s face contorts again, worse this time. Blair watches his hands close into fists again, and this time blood comes sliding out between his fingers, seeping out down his wrists. He can only imagine, what’s happening with what he can’t see. Fingernails morphing into actual claws, ripping through his own skin.

“Fuck, _fuck_ , why is this happening,” Vance manages. He backs up, as much as he can when he’s shackled to the wall and when Blair is right in front of him. He can’t get very far. Blair watches him slide very awkwardly to the floor, until his forehead is pressed into the dirt, blood still dripping from his hands. He swears he can see everything in his back _moving_ , preparing to morph into something else.

“You shouldn’t be near him,” Nadir says, but he doesn’t move an inch. He just wants to do _something_ , oddly enough. Like he said – he knows this. All the bad parts. What it feels like, to completely lose control of yourself in the middle of so many other things swirling past you. Vance’s hands are starting to splatter blood onto the floor, two steady streams of it down both arms, and he wants to tell him to stop, but he knows it will fall on deaf ears. He can’t stop it.

“Blair,” Nadir says, a little bit louder this time. Vance’s entire arm twists, just enough for it to look unnatural, just enough for him to know that something’s happening.

There’s a sickening, very harsh _crack_ , and that’s what finally makes him look up.

It looks like someone’s pulled his spine into two different pieces. There’s a very obvious break in the middle, pushed off to the side like someone’s trying to bend it in half. Vance ends up on the floor, a half-muffled scream into the dirt. The second he tries to get an arm back underneath himself the same thing happens, just above his elbow. It juts out awkwardly, the bones snapping and reforming, and this time when he screams it almost sounds like the very far away beginning of a howl—

Someone grabs him by the shoulders – Nadir, he realizes, and she hauls him back and to his feet. He doesn’t even fight her. It’s too hard to look away, at how awful it is. Like how people always say the ruin of a car wreck is one of the most impossible things to tear your eyes from.

He doesn’t get much of a choice in the matter. Nadir shoves him back outside the door and has the door shut before he even turns around. She slides the deadbolt through, and then the other lock that they just put on two days ago. But just because the door’s shut doesn’t mean anything. He can still hear all of it. They can all hear the screaming, clear as day, and he can still make out every single crack, loud or not, the sound of claws shredding through his skin, the blood still hitting the ground underneath him.

Kelsea must have fled upstairs – Tanis is the only one still sitting there, and the next scream is the loudest one yet. She flattens both hands over her ears.

Nadir still hasn’t let go of the deadbolt. “We’re not getting any sleep tonight, are we?”

He shakes his head.

But it’s not like he was going to, anyway.

—

—

—

Nadir has never been a particular fan of violence.

Probably the funniest thing she’s ever thought, when you begin to make and number the list of all the shit she’s done and been through, but it’s the truth.

She didn’t want to look, when Vance’s entire spine snapped. When he was smearing his own blood all over the floor. And she had even less desire to watch Blair sit there in front of them like the idiot he most definitely is and then get ripped apart when he refused to run.

That doesn’t mean she can make herself walk away, though. It takes her a full minute to even let go of the bolt, and by then Blair’s stepped back up to her side. She tenses, waiting for him to get through the door regardless of where she’s standing, but he leans up against it, face blank.

The screaming’s unavoidable. At least when she was in there she knew exactly what was happening. Now she has nothing.

“What’s going on?” she asks quietly.

He doesn’t respond. She watches his face go through the motions: concern, confusion, a lack of understanding. For Blair to not be able to put what he’s hearing into words must mean it’s bad. The screaming is starting to sound less and less human, every time it starts up. More like the snarl of an animal, just before it leaps at you.

Even she hears the next crack. She’d have to be deaf not to.

“That wasn’t him,” Blair says.

“What do you mean, that wasn’t him?”

“That wasn’t him,” he repeats slower, almost like he doesn’t believe it. “I think that was the wall.”

 _The wall_. She puts a hand back on the door, like she needs something to hold onto. That same crack happens again, and the door seems to shake underneath her palm, all the wood trembling already.

“Go upstairs,” Blair orders, and it takes her a moment to realize he’s not addressing her, but Tanis. “Lock the other door. And tell everyone to fucking stay up there until we say otherwise.”

Tanis doesn’t argue, but Nadir doesn’t think anyone would in this situation. She disappears up the stairs, and when she turns back Blair has both hands flattened along the doors next to hers, still listening.

“He’s not even fully transformed,” she says, incredulous. “When he is—”

“He’s getting out of those chains,” Blair finishes for her. The next step would be the door. They bolted those chains into a solid foot of concrete, and he’s still going to rip through it like paper. Blair might be able to hold the door against him. Might.

“You should go upstairs,” he continues, like he can hear her. “If he gets out you’re not going to be able to do shit except light him up, and I really don’t think we need someone else dead in this house.”

Not like Rooke, who won’t even show his face during this. If only she _could_ make herself go upstairs. It feels like her feet are rooted to the ground, stronger than any set of chains, standing there next to him. She can’t make herself run away from this, not right now.

“Who knows, you might need moral support,” she says. “I’ll stay here.”

He looks surprised. She wishes he didn’t.

“Probably gonna need more than moral support,” he says slowly. “More like a fucking prayer. Better hope that necklace works, ‘cause we’re gonna need it.”

She looks down, even though she can’t see the golden cross hidden underneath her shirt. Normally it feels like a weight around her neck, like someone hung a stone there and forced here to carry it for as long as she physically could. It felt like so much, for something that has done so little for everyone it touched.

“Believe me,” she swears. “It doesn’t.”

She wishes that wasn’t the truth, either.

The screaming cuts off, very abruptly. She holds her breath. The sound of the wall giving way is so much louder in comparison, so different. It’s a wonder she couldn’t tell the two apart in the first place. It’s almost worse, when it’s just that. She can hear the chains swinging, but not much else after that. Blair clearly knows what’s going on. It fills her with a sense of relief, an odd feeling mixed with how much dread is inside her. She’s been feeling a lot of dread lately.

It’s definitely an animal noise she hears next. They left Vance on the other side of the door, and now they have an animal. A fully grown, spectacularly pissed off wolf with the thinnest shred of Vance possible left in it’s brain. She’s dealt with a lot of out of control nonsense in her time, but nothing exactly like this.

She can hear pawsteps, muted footfalls coming through the dirt, closer and closer. The chains wouldn’t have allowed him this close to the door, the threat of a snarl rattling in the back of his throat. He’s already out. He knows they’re down here with him.

It’s unspoken, to be quiet right now. But her heart is beating loudly enough to cancel that out entirely. She’s felt that before. Looking something new and unfamiliar almost in the face, trying to bottle up the terror in order to stay silent. She’s had her fair share of scream-worthy moments, times where she felt sick to her stomach because of what she was living through.

This might be one of them.

She feels Blair tense, before the door nearly caves in towards them.

She’s not entirely sure what happens. The noise is still very faint, indistinct, and then something slams into the door so hard she’s jostled away from it, several feet. Blair throws himself back against the door at the same time, pressing himself back. Fighting the momentum of what she knows is a werewolf trying to break down the door from the other side. Trying to escape where they’re keeping him.

She has next to no supernatural strength, no reason to be down here, but she forces herself back up against the door next to him. It’s shaking, threatening to leap out of it’s frame, or fly off the hinges.

“Vance, you’re definitely getting your ass kicked for this later!” Blair shouts, punctuated by another hit to the door from the other side. She keeps herself there, even though it’s strong enough that she feels as if she could collapse to the ground and not feel bad about it.

The fact that Blair even has the fortitude to make a joke right now is astounding.

It’s kind of grounding, really.

What’s not grounding is how unstable the door is, from two hits. And they’re going to make this last all night? She could open her mouth, ask the stupid question. _What happens if he gets out_? She can’t bring herself to do it. There is no scenario where he gets out, because they’re going to keep him down here. If he gets out they’re the first two to get hit. She doesn’t want him hurt, she doesn’t want Blair hurt, she doesn’t want anyone in this house hurt because they’re unable to see this through.

“You regret moving in yet?” he asks, and the door shakes again as he throws himself against it.

There’s a _lot_ of things she regrets. Yeah, maybe once the sun comes up she’ll think to regret this too, because she shouldn’t be here. She has a room fifteen feet away, and people upstairs who care about her regardless of what they know or don’t know. And she has Blair next to her right now, thankfully not exhausted by this in the slightest, genuinely curious.

“I’ll get back to you on that,” she decides, and he laughs, even as the door shakes.

Of course he does.

—

—

—

It comes and goes.

That first hour neither of them is even able to move away from the door. But the next five move through phases. Sometimes they’re struggling to even keep the door in one piece, sometimes it’s almost completely silent. They can still hear him, when he moves away. Like Vance really is still in there trying to fight it, or make it stop.

It’s almost seven. The sun must be starting to rise outside, but neither of them can see it. She hasn’t heard a peep in nearly an hour, but Blair’s insistent that he’s still fine. That he’s in one piece, that his heart’s beating.

That’s as good as they’re going to get.

She eventually slides to the ground, back still against the door. Blair drops down next to her but keeps listening, clearly. Not that he’s telling her anything, besides the most basic of things.

“Is he changing back?” she asks quietly, unwilling to raise her voice. She’s not about to be the person that sets him off again.

Blair shrugs. “Hard to tell. Changing back should be ten times easier. If he hasn’t he will soon.”

The door at the top of the stairs creaks open, some fifteen or twenty minutes later. Whoever opens it pauses before they start heading down, and a second later Rory leans around the corner. Kelsea is holding onto the back of his shirt, like she had planned on using him as a shield if something bad was happening. That would go about as well as you’d except.

 _All good?_ he mouths, and Blair shrugs again at the same time she does, shoulders knocking together. Blair looks just about done with all of this, and frankly she’s exhausted. He may be used to staying up all hours of the night but she certainly isn’t, and definitely not because she’s trying to hold a door together while fighting back a very pissed off werewolf.

Kelsea quickly crosses the entirety of the basement and wedges her way between them, in order to press her ear against the door. She’s not sure what good that’s going to do, but it must make her feel better.

They could all use that, right about now.

Kelsea’s hand presses over the giant vertical crack in the door, nearly from floor to ceiling. It’s definitely not going to hold another time, no matter how many people are standing on the other side. She very slowly pulls one of the locks free, like she’s testing for a reaction, and Blair’s back up on his feet before she can even blink. She pulls herself up after them. That’s one lock left, to the other side.

Kelsea reaches for the second, but does nothing but lay her hand over it, eyes worried.

“Vance?” she calls nervously, voice still soft. It’s the same thing that Nadir’s been feeling for a while now, an emotion that’s been quelled in the past quiet hour

“He’s back,” Blair says, even quieter, and they both look up at him. Nothing’s changed that she would notice, but Blair seems certain. His hand drops away from Kelsea’s, and Nadir waits for her to move it aside, but it doesn’t come. She swears she almost hears something, the faint shift of something along the ground, different than before.

“Kelsea?” comes the voice, hoarse and pained, hardly audible. It takes her a second to realize that it’s _Vance_ , the sound completely unlike him, and she knows it even though she’s hardly spent two weeks around him.

It’s jarring, and it must be the same for Kelsea, but she’s already sliding the deadbolt open. The second it’s free she’s pushing her way into the cellar, Blair right on her heels. Nadir can hardly see a thing at all from the lack of light, but she takes a step in and catches the door as it comes swinging in, and the claw marks in the door are the most obvious thing she’s laid eyes on in a while. They’re half an inch deep, and even worse in the spots that they continue into the floor. The whole opposite wall is ripped to pieces, the concrete crumbled onto the ground below like someone took a sledgehammer to it. She can’t see much of Vance, curled up on the ground, but there’s definitely no shackles around either of his ankles, and the rest of the chains are broken into half a dozen pieces scattered around the room.

“Hey,” Blair says, and she forces herself to look away from all the ruin and back to him. “Can you go get a blanket or something?”

Right. That’s something to focus on, and her room’s right there anyway. She ducks back in there as quick as she can, because she can already see everybody else starting over here from the stairs. She grabs the first blanket she sees at the end of her bed, one of the only things in the room at all. Thankfully she beats everyone else back to the cellar, and even though Kelsea and Blair are both crouched down in front of him there’s still enough room for her to round all three of them.

Vance looks like he’s trying to sink into the floor, curled into the fetal position. Kelsea is murmuring something to him and he just keeps shaking his head, over and over again, eyes squeezed shut. He’s shaking, even though his bare skin is burning when she drapes the blanket over him, and he flinches.

“Hey, hey, it’s just Nadir,” Kelsea says softly. “Don’t worry.”

She tucks the blanket underneath his arms, still streaked all the way up to his elbows with blood. Everyone else is starting to gather around the door, looking on anxiously, but no one’s moving any closer.

“I can’t,” Vance manages finally, but his voice still sounds just as strangled as before.

“Can’t what?” Kelsea asks.

“Can’t— I can’t do that again, I can’t,” he says frantically. “It hurt, it still hurts. I can’t.”

“You’re not gonna have a choice, man,” Blair points out.

“I _can’t_ —”

“It’s gonna happen a month from now, all over again,” Blair repeats. “But this time’s the worst. It keeps getting easier, until you learn to control it. It hurts now and it’ll hurt next time, but one day it won’t. Just trust me.”

It’s unrealistically gentle, coming from a place of experience that she knows for a fact that Blair’s gone through. He’s got a hand on his shoulder, too, a touch that Vance isn’t flinching away from unlike everything else.

Vance cracks his eyes open, and Kelsea smiles tightly at him. Everyone else looks the same amount of worried, except for Blair, who actually looks very calm, and herself. She’s not sure if she probably looks more resigned, or exhausted. It’s both, most days.

“Alright,” Blair starts. “Upstairs we go, move it Kelsea.”

“I’ll just stay here for the rest of my life,” Vance mumbles into the floor, punctuated by Blair sliding his arms underneath him and then scooping Vance off the floor. Everyone crowded in the doorway immediately backs off, leaving enough space for all of them to slip out.

“So, if Dimara’s going to start charging rent, are you going to start charging him every time you carry him somewhere?” Rooke asks, clearly directed towards Blair. Vance shakes his head in obvious protest before anyone even gets a response in.

Nadir doesn’t really make it out of the cellar. She pauses in front of the door and takes a deeper breath than she can remember taking in the past year.

“Fuck,” she says, unsure of what else there is to say, and Tanis nods in silent agreement. Dimara pushes at the door, which creaks wildly, and frowns.

“Guess I’m gonna add ‘new door’ to my list.”

“What else is on the list?” Tanis asks.

Dimara pauses, seemingly at a loss for words, and then waves her hands for a moment. For some reason, that makes more sense than any amount of words would.

Tanis looks just exhausted as she’s sure she does, when everyone finally trickles upstairs after them. She’s in agreement with Vance, right about now. She wants to lay down right here on the floor and go to sleep, regardless of how close her bed is.

“Well, that was fun,” Tanis decides. “Did you guys have fun?”

Nadir gives her a look. Tanis cracks a smile.

“Sorry.”

—

—

—

Nadir feels absolutely zero urgency to go upstairs, but Tanis eventually pushes her up there, nearly against her will.

She casts a forlorn glance at her bed as Tanis herds her out of the basement, but that’s probably for the best. She chugs her way through one water bottle and starts on a second before she sits down with a thump, putting her forehead down on the table. Upstairs half the house is arguing, mutedly, outside the bathroom. She can’t imagine leaving Vance alone in the shower is going to end well, but it also doesn’t sound as if Vance is about to let anyone stay in there, either.

A really bold argument, for someone who had to be carried upstairs in the first place.

She’s not sure what happens, but she hears the shower start up and the arguing stops. Blair comes down into the kitchen and plucks the half empty water bottle from her limp hand before she can think to stop him, and then downs the entirety of it before she even lifts her head off the table.

“What’s the likelihood that he drowns in the shower, you think?” Blair asks.

“Eighty percent?”

He considers that, and leans back into the hallway. “Someone check on him in like two minutes!”

“You’re being very startlingly nice to him,” she says quietly. It’s weird. Like watching a cat and dog become best friends, out of the blue, with no rhyme or reason behind it.

“C’mon,” Blair says. “You’re telling me you don’t know what it’s like to be alone and scared shitless at the beginning?”

And she does understand that feeling, all too well. She’s felt it herself and watched someone else go through it and hated it no matter what. She just didn’t expect this, coming from him. She doesn’t think anyone did.

But it’s disturbingly weird, not disturbingly _bad._

She has nothing to say, at that, and lays her head back down on the table to avoid looking at him. Either he doesn’t care to wait for a response, or he didn’t want one in the first place. He leaves her alone in the kitchen once again and takes the rest of the noise with him, because everything goes stunningly quiet. After the chaos of the night it’s almost enough to lull her into sleep right there, but she knows her neck will regret it in a few hours.

It doesn’t look like anyone else made it very far either. It looks like Rory’s already accidentally fallen asleep on the couch in the few minutes since he’s been left alone, and Rooke made it no further than one of the wicker chairs out on the porch before he gave up on moving any further. Celia and Dimara must still be inspecting the basement, and she’s sure Tanis went to sleep. Kelsea keeps one eye on the bathroom door for twenty minutes before she gives up and heads off, although there’s no way she goes very far.

Nadir hesitates at the bottom of the stairs when she hears the shower turn off and waits. Clearly Vance is still standing, even if she had less than positive thoughts about his chances. But other than the initial minute or two of him most likely getting dressed, it’s silent.

She heads up the stairs and looks both ways down the hall. No sign of anybody. She can already imagine Kelsea running back out in two minutes, when she realizes he hasn’t come out, but Nadir beats her there.

She knocks, hoping that it’s quiet enough not to alert the whole house. “Vance?”

No response. She quickly opens the door and pokes her head in, almost dreading what the result could be.

Vance is on the floor, knees drawn up to his chest, fast asleep. It almost looks as if he sat down because his unsteady legs couldn’t hold him anymore, and he made the mistake of leaning against the cabinet and his body gave up on him. She crouches down in front of him and puts a hand on his knee, but he doesn’t even stir.

He really does look exhausted. A different sort of exhaustion than she feels, almost all the time, but exhausted nonetheless. But at least now his hands are scrubbed clean, entire body still, swathed in a bundle of warm clothing.

She doesn’t hear anything behind her, so when Blair steps past her and crouches down as well she jolts, although he doesn’t say anything. He just stares at Vance, and then looks to her.

“Really should start charging him, hey?”

She huffs out a laugh, and Blair picks Vance up off the floor once again, the second time in one morning. At least this time he’s silent, comfortable. Almost peaceful.

This is the trouble with getting yourself involved in things, too much and too fast. You start worrying. You start getting attached. And just when you allow yourself to think you can’t possibly live without something, it gets taken away. She doesn’t like the feeling of it happening all over again, not when she didn’t want it in the first place.

She watches Blair take Vance down the hall, back to his own room. She stays there until he comes back out, marvelling at how less than two weeks ago it looked like he was about to send her flying, how he killed half a dozen people in front of her with a flick of his wrist, dug his fingers so hard into skin that it bled.

Now he closes the door to Vance’s room so quietly it doesn’t even make a sound, and he turns around to look at her.

“Wasn’t so bad, was it?” he asks.

It was bad. He knows it, she knows it. Everyone in this house knows it, barred from the basement for the night because of how quickly their fear spread, about something terrible happening.

But it didn’t. That’s a start.

“Could’ve been worse,” she agrees.

That’s true about most things, too.

—

—

—

She doesn’t sleep for nearly long enough.

Tanis wound up in _her_ bed, somehow, and by the time she realized she wasn’t about to crawl back out and manage a half-blind path into Tanis’ room, across the hall. She eyes the cellar just before she closes the door and imagines Vance looking at it later, once he has the frame of mind.

She makes it to about noon before she calls it quits and stumbles out of bed. The rest of the house is silent. Vance is asleep still, which anyone would have seen coming, although she’s certain Kelsea crept in after him after her and Blair left. Rooke’s nowhere to be found, and maybe that’s his way of saying he’s tired, too. Rory’s awake now, but Celia’s taken his spot, and he’s watching television with only one eye open, so maybe he’s not as awake as he wants her to believe.

Dimara and Blair have both vanished too, and when she chances a glance outside the car’s gone.

The whole day it feels like everything is moving in slow-motion, and she’s almost grateful for it. There’s no urgency, no threatening burn inside her threatening to consume from the inside out. For once everyone’s fine, and it doesn’t feel like anyone or anything is in danger.

But with everyone either gone or mostly asleep there’s really nothing to do, except wander. And for once in her life, she doesn’t really feel the desire to go running off.

She can’t remember the last time she felt safe; long enough that if she told anyone else, they’d pity her for it. Too much has happened, spread out over too many years. Even when she finally finds something it’s only a matter of time before she has to move on.

Here, she won’t have to. Everyone knows. No one cares, not really. Half this household doesn’t age, at this point.

She’s not alone.

Tanis may take offense to her considering that just now, and not before, but Tanis will live.

A very relieving thought, for once.

Cleaning supplies in this house are still limited, but she takes at least a garbage bag and a broom into the basement when no one shows any signs of movement, over the next few hours. She collects the pieces of broken chains and tosses them, and then sweeps the floor into something that resembles less of a landmine and more something that’s manageable. It’s not going to fix the wall or the door, and she’s still tripping over the several inch deep gouges in the ground, but it doesn’t look.

"Hey," Dimara says, sometime later. She was just about finished anyway. "We got pizza, if you want to eat. No way in hell I was making food tonight."

Nadir wants to point out how long they were gone, versus how long it would have taken to pick up some food. Chances are the two of them went for a very long drive to clear their heads, one that resulted in Blair driving once Dimara finally succumbed to sleep.

"Thanks," she continues. "You didn't have to – you know, clean all this shit up."

She shrugs. It wasn't like she had anything better to do. She hadn't felt any desire to run off, for once. This place wants to keep her tethered.

"Not just for that, though," Dimara says, and Nadir can't tell if Dimara's talking more than usual or if she's just quieter. "Thanks for staying down here with them. It wouldn't have been safe for anyone else."

It wasn't safe for them, either, which is exactly why she wasn't about to leave Blair down here on his own. If he wasn't here, it probably would have been Dimara instead. Her or Celia. Neither of them looked too eager at that prospect.

"It's fine," she says, finally. "Would've come back if anything bad had happened."

"Can't imagine dying is very pleasant either way."

"That's because it's not," she admits. You'd think it would get easier, after so many times, but you still have that last second when you realize there's no saving you, no matter what anyone could do. The second where your body and your mind and every inch of your spirit gives up on you.

Dimara looks at her, and then takes a step forward into the cellar to nudge at her shoulder. "Alright, go eat. Leave this shit here; we'll deal with it later."

Nadir hasn't been mothered in several hundred years. It's not as terrible as it could be.

She drags Tanis out of bed before she goes upstairs, and then halfway has to carry her up because she's so unwilling to move, even at the idea of pizza. She hears Dimara rummaging around in the cellar for a moment after they leave before she comes after them.

The house still isn't all the way alive. Everyone still looks like they could fall asleep in their pizza, if left alone long enough. They all pile into the living room and only half pay attention to the TV, because it's not the easiest thing in the world.

She still didn't get enough sleep. Tanis puts her head on her shoulder and hardly anyone moves or even speaks until the clock ticks over to eight. Blair barely moves at that time either, but she watches his head tilt slightly back towards the stairs, eyes half open. The floor creaks, loud enough that they finally all hear it, and Kelsea's head snaps up.

"He's not going to come down if you're all staring," Rooke says quietly, knowingly. She allows her head to rest against the back of the couch, eyes forward again. Dimara returns to flicking through the same four news channels, all playing the same thing, except—

"Is that City Hall?" Tanis asks blearily. That's exactly what it is. An aerial shot, perhaps from a helicopter. There are cops everywhere, ambulances. Even in the darkening sky it's clear that something catastrophic has happened, but the building looks normal as always.

It's the headline that reads the worst – NINE CITY COUNCIL MEMBERS KILLED FOLLOWING MONTHLY MEETING.

"What the fuck," Vance says flatly.

Nadir had already forgotten he was about to come down the stairs. By the looks of it, everyone had. She looks back at him, even though for once in her life the news is actually managing to captivate her. He still looks haggard, like he could sleep for another full twelve hours and not care at all. But he's up on his feet, blinking heavily at the screen, clearly confused.

Kelsea is torn, between gaping at the screen and looking at him, so she scrambles off the couch and goes over to hug him instead, eyes still locked on the television.

"That's not good," Celia surmises, even as the Chief of Police appears on screen. There's a lot of words to focus on, but the ones that stick with her are the comments about the lack of weapons. Judging by the descriptions it's horrific, and if they were killed, then it had to be by something.

"Nine people," Rooke says quietly.

"That's the mayor too, right?" Rory asks, and Dimara nods, eyebrows drawn. That's a lot of reason from concern. Nine people just don't go like that, for no reason at all. Least of all people like them. And they most definitely don't get slaughtered by something that isn't probably human.

"Wolves," Vance says, after a very long silence, and Blair looks at him.

"Not you, though."

And isn’t _that_ the biggest relief, in the midst of all this.

—

—

—

Blair can't really say he's surprised, by what happens the next morning.

He was already thinking it anyway. He just thought the general population of the house wouldn't necessarily be in agreement with it. Much to his shock and awe it's Dimara that suggests heading back up into Portland, to check it out.

"Of all the places you guys could take me and you want to take me to a crime scene," Rooke had muttered, which had given Celia enough time to push him into the car before he could disappear. That had given him the time to claim the front seat before she could think to do it, and so they leave.

There's no convincing Vance, who to his credit still sort of looks like he wants to die. Nor Kelsea either, but Blair can't imagine ever willingly dragging her into the middle of a murder fest.

Although like he said last night, at least it wasn't any of them.

That doesn't stop the car ride from being more somber than any of their previous car rides together. Nadir and Tanis all but leave them in the dust on the bike and get there long before they do. Not that they get very close. Half a city block is barricaded off with tape, although there's less people milling around than before. Still several cops and agencies, half a dozen ambulances.

For what, he's not exactly sure. Apparently, there was no saving any of them.

There's two people wheeling a covered body down the front ramp, twenty odd feet away from a horde of very nosy reporters.

"Can we go home now?" Rory asks, and Rooke nods.

Dimara pulls the car off into the nearest space along the curb and he gets out before she's even put it into park. "It's going to smell like blood for a mile in any direction."

"Say that a little louder, hey?" Tanis asks. Except he doesn't really think she's asking.

"It's going to—"

Celia elbows him so hard in the middle of the back that he stumbles into the curb and then trips over it. Dimara doesn't even try to hide her amusement. A stark contrast to how concerned she looked the whole way here.

"Let's just walk around the back," she says. "See if we can get anywhere."

Blair really isn't about to be the one to question why she seems so determined to get in the middle of this. It's half hunter morbid curiosity, that's for sure. He just doesn't know what the other half is.

The rest of the building doesn't appear to be much more accessible, but that's for people that think caution tape is an appropriate barrier to people on the other side. Dimara lifts up the first piece she comes into contact with and ducks under. He's quick to follow, but everyone else lingers on the other side.

"I think I'm gonna go inside," Rooke says, like he hasn't been against this the entire time. And he'll have no issue with it, either. Poof inside in a grand total of one second. Nobody else will be able to do that the way he can.

"I'm going too," Tanis announces, and Nadir turns to follow them wordlessly, the chosen babysitter. Rory sighs.

"No way. I'm staying here. Have fun."

"Don't worry, I will," Blair informs him, and starts off for the building. He's not sure what happens behind him, but a second later Dimara gives chase after him. He can only imagine that Celia is unofficially Rory's babysitter, and professional warder off of cops, if any happen to come this way.

But it seems pretty deserted. The back lot is entirely empty, and he can't even tell which way seems worse. The alleyway leading away, towards the next road over, looks empty of everything except for some garbage. The path leading up to the back entrance is well-worn, the doors locked. He starts down a path down the side of the building. It's narrower than the other alley – the Hall on one side and a wrought iron fence on the other. There's also blood. A healthy amount of it too, dried into the cobblestone cracks.

"Well, there's definitely someone dead down here," he says. "Or at least there was."

"Great," Dimara mutters.

"This was your idea in the first place," he reminds her. "Why are we here again?"

"I don't like having something out there killing people when I don't know what it is."

"Okay, _Sherlock_ ," he emphasizes. "But I can't smell shit except the dead person, so good luck figuring that out."

It's weird. There's no way it was a human being's doing. If it was anything else, save for possibly something like Nadir, then he'd be able to tell what it was. But there's nothing there.

If it wasn't for all the blood around the next corner, he'd be convinced that whatever poor council member this was offed themselves when no one was looking.

But it would probably be hard, to inflict quite that much damage on yourself.

The body's still there, which is the most surprising part. Half-covered by a sheet that must have ripped itself free at some point, enough to expose the torso and head. Or at least what's recognizable of it.

"Christ," Dimara mutters, but skirts around him to get a better look. Why is there no one watching this person's body? Are they asking for this to happen?

"No touching," he orders. "I'm not bailing you out if you get sent to jail."

"Yes you would."

Okay, fair, because that probably means all the responsibility of the house would be left to him and he's not equipped to handle himself, most days. He just thought it would work as a threat, even for thirty seconds. Dimara is still getting closer than any rational or sane person ever would; apparently, they've been rubbing off on her.

Thankfully Dimara keeps her hands to herself, but he realizes that there would be no point in poking around it anyway. There's a split right down the middle of their chest, from the collarbone nearly to the middle of their stomach. The insides of their arms are shredded open, almost like a bird dropped out of the sky and they raised their arms to defend themselves. What he's having difficulty looking away from is the tear stretching across nearly their entire throat, the skin pulled back and stretched like a bloody smile. Like someone did it with purpose, for a particular reason, like whatever crept up alongside them knew exactly what it was doing, before it killed him—

And it's exactly what he must have looked like, in the seconds before he died.

He freezes there, in the alleyway standing behind Dimara. His eyes trail up the splatter of blood all along the wall, right above the body. Like the spray from a hose, painted in a wide arc. But that wasn't there for him. It wasn't there for him because it was careful, calculated. Because he was isolated and alone in the back alley before the sharp burst of pain in his neck, before the teeth. There was no blood splatter up the wall but it was spilling into the dirt underneath him when she finally let go of him long enough for him to hit the ground, before she had crouched down in front of him with her mouth full of his blood and said—

God, what the fuck had she _said?_

And why is he remembering it?

His head is starting to ache, a steady pulsing starting up at the base of his skull and rapidly spreading upwards. It hurts, like random bursts of static right behind his eyes, and it's only getting worse.

"I think I'm gonna throw up," he manages, and turns around.

"What?" Dimara asks, confused, the only thing he hears because by the time she asks it he's already rounding the corner to get away.

Just get away.

That's the only thought he has, amidst the pain.

—

—

—

Blair's not entirely sure where he ends up.

Across at least one street, far away from the caution tape. He gets honked at more than once. He doesn't remember seeing Celia and Rory, but he wasn't exactly looking for them either.

He basically runs into the metal garbage can installed into the sidewalk, and only manages to just grab the edge of it before everything comes up.

He's not surprised to see that three quarters of it is blood, but the sight of it seems to infuse a different kind of pain into his brain, one that flares to life with shock. It kinda feels like he's getting nails driven into his skull. That, or he's about to die on the sidewalk. He doesn't know which option sounds more pleasant.

Someone finally skids to a stop next to him, panting.

"God, you're fast," Rory complains. "It's not fair. What are you doing?"

Blair thinks it's very obvious what he's doing, but apparently not. It's all he can taste in his own mouth, all the blood. After a moment Rory puts a hand on his back, and the touch makes him flinch.

"Are you okay?"

He shakes his head and the pain bursts outward again, more painful than anything thus far, and he feels his fingers spasm and tighten against the railing.

"What's happening?" Rory asks, finally starting to sound concerned. "Tell me what's wrong."

This should make him feel better. Rory's here next to him, holding onto him, and it _would_ feel better if he wasn't certain he was going to black out any second. Rory's not going to be able to do anything about that.

"I remember," he forces out, though it hurts to even talk. "I— I don't know where I was going, but I was in the alley behind the church, and I think – I think I was going to meet someone, but I don't fucking _know_ and it doesn't matter because I didn't see her coming anyway, and she fucking killed me—"

"Alright, calm down," Rory instructs. "Just calm down, take a deep breath."

He can't do that. If he inhales he smells the blood all over again, starts imagining it as his and everything is getting clearer by the second. He has that last image in his head, before his eyes slipped shut, of someone crouched in front of him, of a voice that he can hear like she's in front of him right now.

_I think you want to live._

He lets go of the can, takes one step back, and then he's on the ground.

Rory's hand does nothing, in the long run. He doesn't remember falling. Rory's above him, holding onto his shoulders. He can hardly see him. He rolls halfway onto his side and Rory pushes him the rest of the way there; he has no desire to choke on the blood that's most certainly going to come up again.

Rory's yelling, but not at him. Or at least he hopes. A second later someone else crouches down behind his head, and he can hear Celia's voice, worried and anxious, and Celia never in her right mind sounds fucking _worried_ but she does right now.

It hurts, like someone's trying to shove a branding iron up against his skull. It hurts like Vance said it hurts, and he said he would have to live with it, but this isn't something you live with.

This is something that kills you.

And he remembers what that feels like, now.

It's not just his death. It's everything else starting to filter in, little shreds of things slowly flitting back and forth. Faces he can't put names to and places he doesn't remember, like he's watching everything as an outsider. But somehow, he knows without confirmation that it's all real, that this all happened.

That this is everything he forgot.

"Blair, look at me," Dimara says, and he has no idea where she came from, or when she caught up to them. He wishes he could ask. He wishes he could do anything.

"Blair," Dimara repeats, and he blacks out.

—

—

—

Nadir has grown very use to the feeling of not knowing what's going on.

Her and Tanis haven't even made it inside, when Dimara texts her. One of the only things this new phone has been on the receiving end of thus far, because Tanis hasn't left her side hardly at all.

It's Dimara, and an address. Somewhere on the street over, maybe a block away.

There's no telling where Rooke is, now that he's vanished, but hopefully he gets the memo. She's shocked to discover that Tanis follows, more out of blatant curiosity than anything else. She thought the crime scene would do more than a good job at curbing that curiosity.

But Tanis is behind her when they're crossing the street, and so she doesn't really _see it._

And even then, Nadir isn't sure what she just walked up on.

Her feet stutter to a halt before she's even fully off the crosswalk, and Tanis walks into her back. Typically, Tanis would push her, or force out some snarky comment, but she doesn't this time. It's a good thing, because she'd have nothing to say back.

She only gets a second-long glimpse of Blair's unconscious body on the sidewalk, before Dimara and Rory pull him to his feet between their arms.

"What the fuck happened?" she asks finally, and her voice isn't nearly as steady as she'd like it to be. Dimara shakes her head, and they start walking. But Blair doesn't. He's limp between them, head nearly lolling against his chest. Celia shakes her head too, sharp and annoyed, and skirts around them.

"We're going back to the car."

"What _happened_?" she repeats. He's not injured. They're too close now, enough so that she can tell that something's more wrong than it should be.

"Don't know," Rory says, readjusting Blair's arm around his shoulder. "He was freaking out. I think – I don't know, I think he was remembering stuff. Maybe just the way he died, maybe more than that. But he was in agony."

Well, now she can't move. Tanis' hand tightens around her elbow; she hadn't even realized Tanis was holding onto her in the first place.

There's a lot of people around, staring at them, and she feels like a member of the crowd. Confused, scared, unsure.

"C'mon," Tanis urges, and she gets pulled unwillingly after them, back down the road. She can already see the car, the bike parked alongside it. But that doesn't help. That doesn't explain why this is happening when it shouldn't be. Rory looks stressed, when that's typically Dimara's job. She herself feels sick, the image of him lying there too alike to the last time.

Celia wrenches open the door and the two of them maneuver Blair back into the front seat. His eyes are fluttering by the time Dimara finally let's go of him, but it doesn't seem like he's really focusing on anything. Rory was right – now that he's awake he looks to be in visible pain. He leans away from Dimara's hovering too fast and nearly crashes into the dashboard, but he lowers his head between his knees, face contorted.

She should really stop staring.

"I don't think he knows," she whispers. Tanis is still holding onto her.

"Not yet," she mutters. Is that what this is now? An inevitability? Was this really how this was all supposed to go? She wants to stay, and she wants to run a thousand miles away, at the same time.

Tanis has to practically yank her back to the bike, feet rooted to the sidewalk. Dimara gets back behind the wheel. She doesn't have a choice. They're going back to the house, where it's safer. Where this wouldn't have happened in the first place.

Tanis clambers onto the bike behind her and wraps her arms around her waist. Half the time she doesn't even hold on, anymore. This time she squeezes her, tight enough that it pulls her back.

Dimara wrenches the car away from the curb, and Nadir takes a deep breath. Tanis squeezes her again.

She follows.

—

—

—

The car stops in front of the porch.

She very narrowly avoids hitting it, in her haste.

"I can't believe you guys left me at City Hall," Rooke says, behind them. A spot she had just driven through a moment ago.

She jumps, and Tanis scowls. "Stop doing that. I got you out of the house, I can put you back in it."

"We had a bit of an incident," she explains, and Rooke frowns.

"What kind of incident?"

As if on cue, Blair all but throws himself out of the car, and then proceeds to nearly faceplant into the garden. Rooke stares.

"What's wrong with him?"

It's a miracle Blair even makes it up the stairs intact. Vance and Kelsea are probably about to get a surprise, she realizes, as he basically wrestles with the door to get it open and then stumbles inside. No one else have even begun to move.

Rooke disappears again. She tries to take her time getting off, tucking the helmet away, making sure Tanis scrambles off fine behind her. That doesn’t stop her from moving ten times faster than she normally would, her uneasiness skyrocketing to an abnormally high place.

“God, just go see if he’s alright,” Tanis insists. “You’re going to eventually.”

That’s a fair point. Everyone else still looks sort of shell-shocked, unsure of what to do in this particular situation. Even she doesn’t know. She never thought this would happen; never in her right mind did she think this would be something to deal with, not ever.

The television is hardly audible, in the living room. Kelsea’s standing in the middle of the hall looking into the bathroom. She looks up as Nadir approaches.

“What’s wrong?”

Words she’s already tired of hearing. She’s not surprised Blair made it to the first floor bathroom and no further, but at least no more blood’s come up. He’s still on his hands and knees, still got his forehead pressed into the floor, struggling to breathe. Vance is crouched down next to him, the softness of his voice a very stark contrast to how frantic she feels. She’s not sure it’s doing anything for Blair either, who doesn’t look like he’s listening to a word Vance says anyway.

Blair almost looks like he’s about to start sobbing. That, or a scream will come up instead. She would expect screaming, from him.

“Can everyone just get the fuck out?” Blair manages, finally. Even muffled into the floor the desperation edging into his voice is clear as day.

“Can I stay in here with you?” Vance asks, and if this isn’t the role reversal of the entire century, she’s not sure what is. To think less than two days ago that Vance was the one struggling on the floor, hysterical and pained and exhausted.

“I don’t fucking care what you do, just—”

“Okay, take it easy,” Vance murmurs, and then looks back at the two of them. Everyone else is starting to filter back into the house, watching from a distance. Probably trying to protect themselves from the blow up.

“I’m just gonna close the door,” he continues, and she feels the worry bubble back up. Vance will close the door. She’ll be out here. There’s hardly enough room for two people down on the floor, let alone three. If she shoves herself into such a confined space she’s asking for yet another spike in hysteria that no one really needs right now.

She nods, even though everything inside her is screaming to resist it. There’s no way she wants to be stuck out here, not knowing what the hell is going on outside. But she still takes a step out into the hall. Vance reaches back and catches the edge of the door, swinging it towards them, and she pulls it shut the last few inches.

Everyone else is still lingering around the front door. Whatever half-assed argument they’re attempting to have under their breath isn’t very subtle at all.

Even uncertain, Rory wouldn’t have lied about what Blair had said. He remembered dying. Remembered his last moments in life. And judging by the on-going process, it’s still happening. That means there’s more just waiting to flood in, waiting to overwhelm him.

If it hasn’t already.

“He’s scared,” Kelsea says quietly, long after she closes the door.

And if he’s scared, that scares her.

—

—

—

It’s long into the night before Nadir gets anywhere close to the bathroom again.

And it’s not much better anywhere else, either. There’s no such thing such as taking a break and relaxing, after what happens in the morning. Vance only comes out of the bathroom once; to get food, before he returns. She doesn’t ask if Blair is going to eat. The answer is pretty obvious.

Everyone’s on edge. Dimara keeps the local news on the entire day, waiting to see if there’s any updates about City Hall, but they get nothing.

She said it didn’t look like wolves. But it looked like something alright. Enough that it somehow triggered Blair into seeing everything that happened to him, when he least expected it.

“You’re going to gnaw your hand off if you keep at it,” Tanis says, out of the blue.

They’re sitting on the stairs. Inevitably someone in the living room keeps bringing it up, keeps asking concerned questions, and she can’t handle it. If she looks through the gaps in the railings she can see the bathroom door, down below.

She doesn’t know what good it’s doing.

Apparently, her anxiety is taking control from her. All but two of her fingernails have been bitten or ripped off in the past few hours, and they’re starting to ache. Every once in a while, Tanis will nudge her, but she always keeps at it, after a few minutes of silence.

“I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do,” she admits.

The truth of the matter is this: she can’t sit in the living room with everyone else because she can’t bear to keep quiet, right now. And no one else knows, not the way Tanis does. If she starts spitting out real, honest facts, everyone else will lose it. She’ll spiral. Tanis will sigh and put her head in her hands and wonder once again how she met someone with more issues with herself.

Tanis has her head in her hands now, but she’s looking towards the bathroom door. Still closed.

“You need to tell him.”

“You make that sound much easier than it’ll be.”

“I never said that any of this was going to be _easy_ ,” she insists. “But clearly whatever he’s already going through is bad. Worse than you can imagine. How many vampires wind up remembering, one in ten thousand?”

Probably less than that. She’s sure she’s looked up that particular fact, more than once, but can’t recall the number.

“Either you tell him, or he’s going to figure it out on his own,” Tanis says. “Which would you rather?”

Neither. Both. What she really wishes she could do is flash forward to a few days from now, when everything is in the open and there’s no lies. No secrets. When the pain and the cataclysmic meltdown has faded into the background.

When it will be easy, again.

If it ever returns to that at all.

“I don’t want to fuck this up.”

“It’s already fucked up,” Tanis ever so helpfully reminds her. “You can’t make it any worse.”

Somehow, she doubts that. But she knows Tanis is right. This particular storyline is headed down one path, and one path only. Right now, it’s up to her to urge it down there, to make it better, to smooth things out where the edges are treacherous. That’s what he deserves. That’s what they both deserve, even if he doesn’t know it yet.

She started to matter very little to herself, in the grand scheme of things.

But this isn’t just about him, now.

It’s about her too.

—

—

—

Blair hasn’t been in this level of pain in over a hundred years.

To get hit with it this suddenly is terrifying.

He has no idea how long Vance sits in the bathroom with him. He has even less idea of what time or day it is, or if that even exists anymore. At some point he ends up properly on the floor again, but it’s less blacking out and more slipping off.

The light is dim when he finally cracks his eyes open. Like the softness of the twilight hour. His vision is swimming, even though he’s not moving at all. It still feels like someone’s grabbing him and smashing his skull into the floor, over and over again.

That’s what the good part was, of being out. He didn’t feel anything.

And he wasn’t remembering, either. It was just peaceful, quiet black. Nothing to worry about. Nothing that could hurt him.

“How’s your head?”

Nadir’s voice – not Vance. She must be sitting behind him. Not that he can tell, with how spotty his vision is. It feels like someone’s shoved him underwater and refuses to let him up for air.

Not that he needs it. But he feels like he does, now.

“How long have you been in here?” he asks. He doesn’t really feel the need to answer.

“Few hours.”

“When did Vance leave?”

“Around six in the morning.”

“What time is it now?”

“Almost ten.”

He groans, muffled, into the floor. There’s no way he’s been in here for nearly an entire day. Is that why he feels like he’s been hit by a truck, then? He never sleeps this long. Is practically physically incapable of it, now. But he’s been laying here for quite a while, apparently. Dead to the world.

“Do you need anything?” she asks, and he shakes his head. Wrong move. Even that slight moment is enough to set his brain off again, his skull threatening to split directly down the middle. He can’t even keep his eyes open through how bad it _hurts._

Whenever it hurts is when the images start, too. Just before he passed out yesterday he was starting to see things, almost in too much focus. Streets he remembered walking down, but not where they were. A face of someone he knew, but not what their name was. A house and the steeple of a church and the river, the woods far off on the edge of society, with things about to come crawling out.

His head is already being stabbed through with pain anyway, so he rolls over and nearly into Nadir’s legs. She’s looking down at him, eyes very soft, crinkled around the edges where he can see the worry. He can feel the fear. Can sense it. The sudden spike when he rolled over to look at her, unexplainable.

“Is everything okay?” he questions.

“Ask yourself that question, not me.”

Alright, fair enough. He is currently the one lying on the bathroom floor, after all. He wonders when the pain will stop. When everything will finally make sense.

She’s got her fingers on that cross again, the chain tangled up around them. Useless, or so she says.

“I remember something like that,” he says quietly, and she looks down at it, fingers stilling.

“Yeah? What about it?”

“I don’t know. It just feels familiar. Like I had one like it, or something.”

She swallows and let’s go of it. The pendant drops back down into the hollow of her throat like it belongs there, a safe haven.

“You did,” she says.

“What?”

“You did. Have one like it.”

He stares at her. Her fingers are twitching, like she’s itching to pick it back up again, if only to do something with her hands.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

Her face falls, just a little. She swallows again. “Your brother had one. And this one—”

“Hold on,” he interrupts, and her jaw snaps shut. “I don’t – _what?_ My brother?”

Suddenly there’s an image in his head, a face he’s seen a dozen times since yesterday. His brother. Mauro. A face that’s there with this sudden clarity now, like he’s looking back in a mirror with the subtlest differences. The pain’s starting back up now, renewed.

He doesn’t even realize he’s looked back down, eyes closed, until she puts a hand on his arm. He pulls himself back, pressed up against the wall. There’s nowhere else to go.

“You’re talking like,” he gets out. “Like, you’re talking as if you were there, and I don’t—”

“Because I was.”

He opens his eyes and looks at her. She looks no different than the previous few seconds, except now she’s reaching out towards him a little bit, more concerned. Nothing at all has changed. And it shouldn’t have.

Except he opens his eyes and looks at her, and it’s like he’s looking at something else.

—

—

—

Nadir has never watched someone’s face change, in the way she watches Blair’s then.

Up until that moment, all the pain and the confusion are warring together, mixed with a side of upset anger that he can’t manage to shake. But when he looks up at her after that, his eyes go completely blank. Everything in his body tenses, his shoulders going completely stiff.

He opens his mouth more than once, but nothing ever comes out. She can hear every one of his breaths, harsh and frantic. His hands are like hers – searching out for something to grab, in his panic. Looking for something to hold onto.

“No,” he whispers.

“Blair—”

“No,” he repeats. “This isn’t – this isn’t happening right now. This isn’t real.”

“It is. And I know that it’s hard to believe.”

He shakes his head, and she can tell how bad it hurts. “It’s not real. It can’t be real. You – you just knew all of this by some fucked up coincidence, and it was someone else. You weren’t there, you didn’t know me, you didn’t.”

“I met you in 1763,” she says quietly. “Three years before you died.”

He keeps shaking his head, like that makes it any better. She’s not prepared when he suddenly lurches to his feet, hand clutching at the counter. Half the things on the top go clattering wildly to the floor in his haste.

“That’s mine,” he croaks, and his eyes have lasered in on the necklace. “That’s mine, and you – how do you have it, I don’t _understand.”_

“Your brother gave it to me,” she tells him. “After. He already had one, like I said. He told me I should have yours. Because that’s what you would have wanted. Because I—”

“Don’t,” he snaps, and she hopes beyond reason that it’s not a sob threatening to break free from his chest. “If you finish that sentence, God, I don’t even fucking know. I can’t be in here.”

He shoves past her and out the door faster than her eyes can track. By the time she throws herself into the hallway after him the front door is swinging open, not even yet having hit the outside wall.

But he’s gone. Nowhere in sight.

Just like he wanted to be.

Someone steps out of the kitchen, in her peripheral. She’s too focused on the door to tell who.

The floor creaks behind her, and she knows it’s Vance even before she hears the deathly quiet _holy shit_ come out of his mouth. He was right around the corner, supernatural hearing and all. He probably just heard their whole conversation.

But Celia didn’t. It’s her that steps out of the kitchen, eyes flitting between the door and her. “What just happened?”

Nadir can’t breathe. She’s quite convinced her lungs are about to collapse, and Blair’s _gone,_ and she didn’t say it, half because he told her not to and half because she’s not sure the words would have come out anyway.

She has no answer for Celia. She doesn’t even have one for herself.

The front door is very quietly hitting the wall, with every gentle push of the breeze. It’s the only sound she can hear, aside from the thumping of her heart in her ears.

She’s not aware of how badly she’s shaking until Vance puts a hand on her shoulder.

But it doesn’t help.

He’s gone. He’s gone, and there might not be any coming back from this.

—

—

—

Blair’s always been very good at running.

And there’s a problem, with moving so fast it’s akin to the speed of light. You can end up anywhere in minutes, if not seconds. He could be a hundred miles away, or ten.

The woods, somewhere. The trees are sparser, but the undergrowth is threatening to entrap in his feet here forever. That doesn’t sound so bad, honestly. He has no idea where he is and no way to tell, and it’s easier that way.

There’s a dirt road, through the trees to his left. The vaguest sign of civilization that he only takes a few steps towards before his knees threaten to give out again, legs wobbling alarmingly.

Remembering shouldn’t hurt like this. It should be peaceful, and soft, like the clarity that comes with remembering a dream upon waking. But the pain’s starting to move. He can feel it in the base of his neck, and it feels like the tips of his fingers are numb, the burn starting to stretch to the rest of his hands and up his arms.

He wishes that someone could tell him why it hurts so bad, the few who have gone through it before him.

There’s no one around. He’s completely alone, but not in his mind.

He doesn’t know what it was about her voice, that started to bring it all back, worse than before. Suddenly everyone that was so vague in his mind begins to piece together and make sense, a puzzle finally finished after so many years of going unsolved.

It was like he was back there – wherever _there_ even was. It was the only thing he couldn’t remember. Everything else was coming in too harsh and too fast, bombarding him with things that he couldn’t make sense of before he could see something else.

Places he would walk to, familiar streets. The house he grew up in. The space just outside of town where the meadow started growing wild in the summer. His brother. His parents. Two faces that continue on faintly in his head no matter how hard he tries to focus in on them, like even back then he was doing his best to forget about them.

But he can see her so clearly. Nadir’s face has hardly changed at all, when so much has.

He can’t get a grip on any one specific emotion. The fear’s the most overwhelming one, edged with all the pain. But there’s the others – the familiarity, uneasiness, and worry alongside something gentler. The feeling of being safe and loved and warm for once in his life, something that strikes him so hard in the chest he almost wants to sink to the ground and cry.

She knew him. He knew _her_.

Knew isn’t a strong enough word. It felt like he had given up a part of himself for her to hold onto, and then got himself ripped away. A sharp, blinding pain in a back alley, his feet no longer able to carry him back to her. He was headed towards her. There’s no image in his head to confirm that but he _knows_ it, and more importantly, he believes it.

There’s a lot of pain that comes with believing it.

He almost makes it to the road. The only faint glimpse he catches of its surface makes him realize that there’s nothing around here at all, no people. No one’s been this way in quite some time; the harsh surface unmarred by any sort of traffic, wheel or foot.

That’s almost a good thing. There’s no chance someone’s going to find him. He doesn’t want to be safe and warm right now – he just wants it all to stop. He wants to be back on the bathroom floor, not facing the world, head consumed by nothing but black.

There’s no chance of that now, because of how far he ran. There’s no way in hell he’s going back.

That’s what he wants right now. To be far away. That’s the option that makes the most sense.

And that’s the ground he hits, two seconds later.

At least he catches himself this time. But his hands are only under him for a few seconds before he lets those go too, arms folding underneath. He could almost reach out and touch the road, but it’s probably for the best that he can’t. The slope of the ditch looks so steep, from down on the ground. Like an unclimbable mountain, something impossible to tackle.

He lets his head rest in the grass. It’s cooler down here, easier to breathe.

He lets himself go once again, with the knowledge of just how much he has.

And how scary things seem now that he has it all.

—

—

—

If you think for a second that Nadir sleeps a wink all night, you’re wrong.

She hardly moves away from the front of the house. Every waking moment she has is consumed by the fact that he has to come back eventually.

And if it’s not that, it’s someone asking her what happened. Vance looks at her for twenty minutes like his eyes are about to fall out of his head, and then goes for a walk. Tanis sits on the floor in front of her and stares, all while she tries not to give into the urge to throw up.

They’ve had enough of that, the past twenty-four hours.

She hears the same words from everyone else in the house. What happened? What did he say? _Did_ he say anything? Is he coming back?

Too much. Not enough. Unfortunately. She doesn’t know.

Vance gets back way after the sun goes down. She’s the only one still awake down here – Tanis fell asleep not long ago curled up by her feet, determined to stay with her. He must not expect her to be there, because he takes his time shedding his coat and toeing his shoes off, before he turns around. When he does he stops at the sight of her, face unreadable.

“If you wanna say something, everyone else is asleep,” she offers.

He stares. Swallows. Reaches down to play with the hem of his shirt before darting another quick glance her way, unsure.

“How much of that was true?”

“All of it.”

“So, you guys were like—”

“Yeah,” she murmurs. “We were.”

Vance looks back outside again, before he closes the door. “I didn’t see any sign of him. I thought I might be able to. Maybe I just don’t have a good enough handle on it yet to track anybody, I don’t know. I thought I would try anyway.”

She hadn’t even realized that’s what Vance’s goal was, upon leaving the house. She thought he was just desperate to get away from her and the sudden awkwardness.

“Thank-you for trying.”

“I’ll do it again tomorrow. Keep an eye out for him, until he comes back.”

Vance says it like he knows the outcome, when even she doesn’t have that particular privilege. He’s been through a lot, these past few days. Changing and hating himself and being ripped apart by claws that were fundamentally him. There are criss-crossed scars all over his palms, now. And all of that got thrown away so quickly in the face of this. A newer problem. Something that accidentally took over.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asks him, and he nods. Too quick to be really convincing, but she has to trust him on this. She has no other choice.

“I’m gonna go to sleep,” he says. “Maybe try and do that yourself.”

She nods, and although the smile she produces is weak at best, he’s the same as her. He has no other choice but to accept it and move on, hoping that things will look better in the morning.

She still can’t bring herself to get up and lock the door. Perhaps it’s foolish to believe that he’d come back so soon. Even she doesn’t think she would, if their situations were reversed. If she were the one in that much pain, in that much emotional distress, she’d find the darkest, most secretive corner of the earth to ride it out in, until it was safe to come back out.

But she knows it, and now he knows she knows it too.

Blair’s never been good at hiding.

—

—

—

Much to her grand surprise, she does actually get some sleep.

It’s touch and go, for the most part. Tanis moves, and she’s awake. Someone moves around upstairs, she’s awake. The sun comes up. Shockingly enough, she’s awake.

The odd part is, it’s easier to sleep when the sun comes up. The house starts to come alive. The steady knowledge that everything is still moving around her makes it easier for sleep to come back. No one’s tip-toeing around, struggling to be quiet. They’re being themselves, ridiculously loud racket and all.

It’s not worrying to admit that she’s already grown too used to it.

She only wakes up, just shy of noon, because the door opens. She doesn’t bolt upwards, or leap to her feet. She forces herself not to.

It’s a male voice, but not Blair’s. Obviously Dimara is the one responding, because everyone fled at the first sign of another human being standing on their porch. She stretches her legs out to find Tanis gone, no surprise there. She strains to hear but can’t make out very much of the conversation.

Eventually, the male voice fades off, but it’s a good minute or so before Dimara slams the door shut, hard enough that the walls shake.

“Who was that?” she mumbles, and cracks open an eye. Dimara has lifted the curtain back just a sliver and is glaring out of it, harsher than usual.

“Fucking cops,” she mutters, and finally she resigns herself to opening both eyes. Not a full night’s worth of sleep, not even close, but apparently what she got is as good at it’s going to get.

“Why were the cops here?”

“Apparently we drew enough attention after City Hall that a few people pointed the cops in our direction. They said if they find any more reason to believe that we’re poking around where we shouldn’t be, they’ll come back with a search warrant.”

That finally makes her sit up. She can just make out the faint silhouette of the cruiser peeling off down the driveway through the front door.

“They can’t possibly think it was us,” she says. “There’s no reason for that. Just because we were there—”

“Someone had to have followed us back here, too,” Dimara says angrily. “My official address is still back in Portland, and nobody else is registered here. They wouldn’t know any other way.”

So, that’s great. The cops are suspicious of them. People are trailing them back to the house, people who whose negative emotions towards the supernatural are already amplified after what happened at City Hall, with the lack of answers that have been produced.

Someone could have found out what her and Blair did to all those hunters, too. Surely someone had to have found the bodies. The smoking wreckage of the house.

“I don’t like this,” Dimara says.

“We didn’t do anything,” she reminds her. “At least not to any council members. We’re not guilty.”

“Doesn’t matter if you’re guilty or not. Last time people came up to this house thinking someone was guilty they hung someone in the doorway.”

She has to be talking about Rooke. Nadir had an idea, same way everyone does, but she never felt the need to know. Not when it’s clearly drained him to talk about it the amount of times he has. Not when she knows what it feels like, to explain something like this.

But it makes sense. The bruises, the haunted look in his eyes.

That doesn’t just come from being dead of a normal cause.

They didn’t do anything, that she’s right about. But in this day and age people don’t tend to care about that. If you look guilty, you are. There’s no innocent until proven guilty anymore, not when you’re a Fable. The outside world hunts them down and murders them and tears them apart.

Or at least they try to.

“Let’s just hope Blair gets back soon,” Dimara says. “Before anything fucking terrible happens.”

Nadir wishes she had the guts to tell Dimara that something already has, but she stays silent. They’ve got enough to deal with. They’ve got people watching them. Ready to threaten them. Some of whom must be just waiting until that second, when they can slam the gavel down.

Sentence: guilty of existing.

—

—

—

Blair wakes up freezing, soaked, and disoriented straight to hell.

It’s pouring rain, overcast in every direction. He’s basically collapsed in on himself, in the same spot he passed out in. The grass is slick and hard to find purchase in. His shoes come into contact with water, a whole lot of it, and he looks down. The ditch is half full.

How long was he out, for it to have filled up that much?

He pulls himself up onto the side of the road and lays there. There are tire tracks in it now, deep gouges that have already flooded with water. Whoever it was probably didn’t see him. That, or they didn’t care enough to stop.

He probably wouldn’t have either. Certainly not for someone looking as miserable as him.

It’s cold. His head is still thumping like someone’s playing drums in the middle of his brain, except the concept and memory of being warm has suddenly chosen to flee the harsh confines of his skull.

The car that suddenly comes chugging down the road is old and making enough noise to wake the dead, fortunately for him. He forces himself to sit up but doesn’t get any further. He can hardly see the face behind the wheel. The wipers are sweeping back and forth frantically, squeaking with every pass they make.

It’s irritating.

The car starts to slow, the closer it gets to him. The polite thing would be to stand up, possibly ask for directions. But he really doesn’t want to move. Maybe he can’t. He can’t really tell.

The car stops directly next to him, ten feet away. A teenager is peering out at him – gangly, glasses, probably just passed his driving test and wound up acquiring his dead grandfather’s car, something he doesn’t want but will use anyway, until something better comes along.

The window rolls down and drops of water go splattering all over his lenses.

“Are you okay?”

“Do I look okay?”

The kid pauses. “Do you want me to answer that honestly?”

Blair would have to be actually, physically dead to not notice how terrified the poor kid looks. Like he just turned onto Elm Street and is expecting Freddy Kreuger to come leaping out of the bushes at him.

Close enough.

He lurches to his feet, and nearly goes over again. The kid’s hands tighten around the steering wheel, and Blair can’t see his foot inching back towards the gas, but he can sure as hell imagine it.

“Can you tell me where the hell I am?” he asks.

“County road seven.”

“No, like, where in the country am I right now?”

He’s really hoping he’s still in the same country. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s accidentally booked it over an international border without entering properly.

“Just outside of Conway, New Hampshire.”

New Hampshire. Well that’s something. Not once in his New England-related travels did he ever wind up in _Conway, New Hampshire._ That’s some ways from the Cape, for sure. Further than he thought he got.

He’s pretty sure if he continues standing there he’s bound to end up lying in the road again, but he’ll trip and fall if he tries to go back down into the ditch, and he doesn’t think holding onto the car is going to end well.

“What day is it?”

“July 21st?”

Three days. He left on July 18th, he’s sure of it. He just had a pain-induced blackout in a ditch for _three days_.

He makes a few tentative footsteps down the road, away from the car. “This way back towards civilization?”

He looks reluctant to answer, and Blair sighs. “I’m not about to go raze the entire town to the ground, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I – I could give you a ride?”

“Word of advice,” he manages. “Never offer that to anyone you find sitting on the side of the road ever again.”

“I was just trying to be nice.”

“Stop being nice too,” he tells him. His legs already feel like they’re getting steadier. The same can’t be said about his brain, unfortunately.

He can feel the kid staring after him but doesn’t look back. There’s no reason to. Hopefully he just taught him a very valuable lesson about staying where you’re meant to stay, and not talking to strangers.

Or maybe not. He could have killed him, but he didn’t.

That’s progress.

—

—

—

Conway is a very quaint little town, for someone who does not have the word quaint in his overall vocabulary.

It takes him nearly an hour to even hit the entrance sign. Less than ten thousand people. There are mountains up ahead, in the distance. It’s still pouring rain, and he’s really not prepared for that.

He’s not sure how he ran this far in the first place, when his legs are so reluctant to even take a few steps at a time. He has to stop more than once. Get his bearings. Catch his non-existent breath. He throws up what little blood is left in his system not far from the main road and nearly chokes on it.

By heading this way, he’s getting further away from Maine. He’s sure of it.

His body doesn’t know what to do.

He wanders. Freezing rain Conway is not a very hospitable place, he comes to discover. It probably doesn’t help that he’s soaked through, streaked with mud, has the taste of blood permanently in his mouth. It feels like hell has frozen over, or him.

He finds Intervale next, not a town at all. He spends most of his time wandering down the highway and through the trees.

Walking is not helping at all. It’s just draining him more. He doesn’t have any money to get on a bus, and doubts someone would be stupid enough at this point to pick him up off the road, save for a very stupid teenager.

He winds up wandering back across the border into Maine, and somehow knows that he spends days alone before he winds up finding civilization again. Lovell’s filled with water – lakes that stretch for miles, and he stares until his vision goes out of focus, because it’s easier that way.

Highway 302 is very bleak, he comes to realize. You can wander for days, probably weeks, and not hit a place big enough to make a blip on any significant map.

Bridgton is greener than he remembers it being. Naples is not. After Raymond he spends all his hours quite convinced that he’s going to die, even more convinced that he’s okay with it. There’s nothing in sight. There are signs trying to warn him off the highway, trying to get him closer to places with actual life, but he never turns off.

He may not be dead, in technicality, but it feels like he is, when he finally hits Westbrook.

The name flickers to life in his mind. Everything up there has faded into a very dull roar. That’s a place he recognizes. He’s close to Portland. Closer than he thought he would be. And if he’s close to that, the Cape’s not far behind it.

It’s around that point when he veers off the highway and hits the beach. The sand’s ten times harder to navigate through than the open road, but at least following the ocean he knows where it’s going to take him. The sand turns to pebbles, and then slabs of rock. The lighthouse rises up out of the earth, a monolith, a sign that’s trying to point him in the right direction.

There’s no time, in his brain, but the trees are familiar, vague shapes that are trying to pull him back in.

He doesn’t make it very far.

There’s a diner, on the nearest corner. Sheltered by woods on all three sides save for the entrance, and the dark lot. It’s pitch black outside, and he can hardly see where he’s putting his own two feet, but the front door gives way underneath his clumsy, numb fingers, and he steps in.

The sudden blast of warmth nearly makes him stagger, and he grabs back for the door. Almost all of the lights are off. There’s no one in sight.

“We’re closed!” a voice calls, from somewhere he can’t see. Not very closed, for an establishment that still has the door open, but he doesn’t have the energy to fight. He doesn’t have the energy to do much of anything. Getting out the door is one of those things that he finds he can’t make himself do, and when he glances over his shoulder there’s a woman behind the counter staring at him, eyebrows raised, hair as dark as the night.

“You heard me, right?”

“Yeah,” he says, voice hoarse from disuse. He winces at the sound of it. Right, lack of human interaction in however many days he’s been out here will result in that.

She’s still staring. His hand is still very uselessly holding onto the door.

“Sit down,” she sighs, and he hates the lack of fight in him when he turns around and heads for the first booth he sees and sinks down into it like he doesn’t have legs at all. She flicks one of the lights back on and he’s still staring at the table when she drops something down in front of him; a menu, and a glass of water.

“I’d get you some blood, but unfortunately for you we don’t keep a readily available supply of it in the fridge.”

He looks up at her. She doesn’t look as nice as he would imagine someone like this should look, but she also doesn’t look scared either. If she can tell he needs it, then he looks pretty terrible. And that’s not accounting for everything else.

“Do you want anything else?”

“Don’t need anything. Don’t have money anyway.”

“Is that the truth, or are you just saying that because you can’t pay me?”

“It’s the truth,” he mumbles. He doesn’t even think he has the energy to eat, and he never thought he would say that a day in his life. She stuffs her notebook back into her apron and scoops up the menu, already striding away.

“You can stay until I’m done cleaning up,” she calls back. “But then you’ve gotta scram.”

He nods, even though she’s not looking at him, and sags against the wall, already closing his eyes. There’s a little bit of warmth starting to seep back into his veins. Whoever said the kindness of a stranger couldn’t do wonders for somebody was clearly lying, because he’d feel more content to die here in this booth than anywhere outside.

He doesn’t get the chance.

He doesn’t expect to nod off when he closes his eyes, and it only feels like a second before there’s a hand on his shoulder, gently prodding at him, and he jolts awake.

She’s standing over him, eyes crinkled. “All done. You good to go?”

No. No, he’s really not. But what the hell is he supposed to say? She didn’t have to let him in at all, and she still did that. He’s still terrified, and hurting, and he just wants to stop convincing himself to walk away but he doesn’t know how.

He wants to go back. He wants to feel safe again.

He hates the fact that he’s scared of that.

“You got a home to go back to?” she asks, and he nods blindly. There’s no way he’s about to lose it in front of a stranger and have the final peak of his meltdown in the middle of her diner, but his eyes are burning anyway. They’re really going to try and pull this on him right now.

He has a home, out there. It’s not very far at all.

“Do you want me to take you there?”

When he shakes his head and it only aches faintly, instead of stunning him into silence with pain, he wants to sob. He wants to run away again, or back home. He wants to understand why all of this happened, and probably never will.

Her hand hasn’t left his shoulder. He’s definitely not about to hug a stranger, either.

“I need to go back,” he manages, and she nods. He’s not sure whether that’s in agreement, or she’s finally satisfied with something that’s come out of his mouth. It wouldn’t be hard, with the shit he’s come up with thus far.

He needs to go home and face this, whether he wants to or not.

And he’s going to, soon.

Even thinking the word is like feeling relief crash over him, for the first time in a long time.

—

—

—

“I don’t like going out at night,” Rooke complains.

“Nothing can even fucking hurt you,” Tanis insists. “Give Vance a break for one night and come with us.”

It’s been two weeks. Two very long, painfully empty weeks, and Nadir’s hated every waking, and sleeping, second of it. Blair ever went further than any of them could have guessed, or he’s close to home and refusing to take a step back in this direction.

Vance has gone out almost every night, looking for any sign of him. On the rare times he hasn’t, it’s been someone else. Tanis is determined to go tonight, although Nadir thinks it’s more for her benefit.

She’s already waiting on the porch, and Tanis drags Rooke out after her and then slams the door shut. He sighs.

“C’mon, let’s go.”

Nadir starts off down the drive and into the meadow, assuming the scuffling she’s hearing behind her is Tanis attempting to shove Rooke down the stairs in front of her. Realistically, they’re not going to see any sign of him. Vance is their best chance at finding him, after all, but Vance also is getting a rough four hours of sleep a night currently, and it’s only a matter of time until he passes out.

They really don’t need any more of that in their lives right now.

At least heading out into the woods makes her feel better, even if it should have the opposite effect. There’s almost no chance they’ll find him, but at least she’s looking. At least the chance exists, no matter how small. And it’s hard to be truly scared of what comes out in the night-time when you’ve been walking through it for so long, unafraid.

They could have brought a flashlight, though. Not one of them’s got the ability to see in the dark, unless she wants to light a tree branch on fire and wave it around.

Which isn’t the worst idea she’s ever had. But it’s also not the most productive, either.

Even being productive has been a struggle. Tanis is probably sick of her pacing and general worry and anxiety about the whole situation. That’s why they’re out here right now, wandering in circles through woodland paths that don’t even really exist. It’s more for themselves than it is for Blair.

“Do you think he’s going to come back?” Rooke asks. Apparently, he’s in the same mindset that she is. You can’t make someone come back if they don’t want to.

“He’s got nowhere else to go,” Tanis reminds him. And while that’s true, it doesn’t really matter. Blair hasn’t had a place to go since the day he died, but he’s always managed without a home. Now probably isn’t any different.

She’d like to think everything was different, now that he knows. But maybe it isn’t.

She also can’t help but wonder if Rooke knows. Vance hasn’t told anyone, to her knowledge, but Rooke could have overheard it too. If he did he’s never let on to it, nor as he ever asked her about it. But now, with Tanis holding onto his arm to keep him here with them, she’s really curious. He’s impossibly unreadable, when he wants to be, and now is no different. She’s not sure she has the courage to ask him directly.

He narrows his eyes, and for a second, she thinks he’s making that face at _her_ , wondering what she’s finding so interesting about his lack of expression. He stops, and Tanis jerks to a halt when he refuses to budge a step more.

“What is that?”

She pauses herself and turns around. The woods are shadowy, the near moonless sky unable to break through the canopy down to them. She doesn’t see much of anything for what has to be thirty seconds, but Rooke clearly does.

“Is that – is that a person?” Tanis asks, and her eyes finally lock into something, not very far off into the trees up ahead of them. It looks like a person. The silhouette is narrow, tall. Shapeless enough that she can make out almost nothing else except for the eyes.

Red. Blindingly red. Two glowing sparks in the middle of the forest.

And the breeze is carrying something towards them; the scent of a recently burnt back forest, charred and dead flesh.

A branch cracks, underneath a foot. It’s moving. She doesn’t see it get any closer but knows it all the same.

“What the fuck is that?” Tanis says quietly. She glances over her shoulder, shocked to find that Rooke hasn’t already taken off on the both of them. Tanis has her hand locked around his arm more fiercely now, adamantly refusing to let go.

The closer it gets, the more she sees. His skin is cracked and brittle, stretching all over his body, all the way to the twin horns that are curled back nearly against his skull. There are talons protruding from his fingertips, four or five inches long, and he’s looking at them with the slightest tilt of his head, red eyes slitted to near nothingness. She swears she can hear the crackle of an open flame, but the woods remain dark.

She’s seen demons before. Demons that look so human that you’d never be able to tell. She’s not sure how they manage it. This is what she expects them to look like. This one’s old and appearing pretty pissed off. What little clothes remain across his body are shredded and blood-soaked, hanging off him in tatters.

She thinks back to what Dimara said, about the council. About the ripped out throat and the open chest of the man they found in that alley. Her eyes land on the talons, nearly brushing against one another, and knows his mouth must be full of teeth almost the same.

This thing shouldn’t be here.

And judging by the look on it’s face, neither should they.

“Rooke,” she says slowly. “I think I’m only gonna get the opportunity to say this once, so you better be listening.”

His gaze snaps back to her, eyes wide. “I am.”

“Make sure Tanis gets back to the house.”

She doesn’t hear Tanis’ response.

The thing clears nearly twenty feet of forest undergrowth in one leap and slams into her. She goes skidding back, off the path and into the brush with it on top of her, clinging to her shoulders with all the force of a rabid animal. The talons are digging into her shoulders, plunging deep into skin and muscle, scraping against bone.

She’s felt a lot worse pain than this. Mentally and physically.

It’s stronger than her. Faster than her. Fire doesn’t scare it. She’s not even entirely sure fire will kill it but finds the burn at the base of her palms igniting regardless, and shoves her hands against his chest. The remnants of the shirt light like kindling and it rears back and _screams_ , the sound unlike anything she’s ever heard. It pierces deep into her ears, and the talons come free from her shoulders after ripping through several inches of previously unmarred skin.

She brings a foot up and kicks at its chest, until it falls back off of her. The shirt is already turning to ash, but not catching onto anything else.

So that’s a no-go. And she’s pretty sure it will be spitting fire back at her, any second now.

She’s not prepared for how much of her own blood she sees, before she clambers back to her feet. He yanks away the last of the fabric, and its chest is already scorched and burned all over, like the skin is melting off.

“Are the other two more fragile?” he asks, and the sound of such a human voice is terrifying, even if it’s like hearing nails raked down a chalkboard. “Are you the _sacrifice?”_

Hopefully not. She can see Tanis and Rooke, just through the trees to their right. Tanis has to be fighting him. They’d be long gone if not.

She wishes Tanis would stop fighting, just once.

“Go ahead, little bird,” he continues, and she does feel very little, right about now. “Light the woods up, see what happens.”

There’s a thick, dead branch just under her feet, and she reaches down and scoops it up. The whole thing goes up in flames instantly. It allows her to see, when she couldn’t before. Like a torch.

A torch won’t win her any battles.

It looks amused, and when the slow smile spreads across his face she catches a glimpse of the teeth, rows and rows of them, as long as her fingers. Is it a he, even? There’s no way to tell, even with light. It takes another pace forward, and she clutches tighter to the branch. Her shoulders feel more on fire than her hands do.

“One of you compared to nine of them,” it says. “Which do you think is easier?”

Nine’s the lucky number, with them. Nine council members. Nine of them.

“I’m not the only one. Where one falls another rises.”

And this one falls tonight.

It’s about to continue on, and she lunges forward and catches it in the chest. It goes stumbling back, and the branch nearly connects with it’s throat before it willingly leaps back, away from her. It goes scuttling into the undergrowth and reappears ten feet to her left. She grabs the end of the branch, palm searing hot, and feels half of it give way, the pointed edge digging into the tips of her fingers.

It cocks its head again and _laughs_ – laughs and leaps towards her.

She meets it somewhere in the middle.

It’s like crashing into a wall, the branch outstretched. She nearly ricochets away back through the undergrowth. The burning branch sinks into the weakened center of it’s chest and she feels it break free from the back.

A hand scrabbles against her throat, pressing in along both sides. She tries to jerk away from it without getting very far and two fingers close around the chain lying there and yank so hard she goes stumbling forward into it again. She feels the whole thing snap off, the clasp giving way from one pull, and the necklace goes flying somewhere into the dirt, somewhere she doesn’t see.

The second she’s pulled back, she knows it’s bad.

There’s a sharp, electrifying pain in her torso the second she thinks it.

She looks down, and half of it’s other hand is buried in her stomach.

It’s not just the talons. They’ve ripped away enough of her skin and everything underneath it that the fingers are pressing into her abdomen to the second knuckle, twisting and turning. Any more and the talons will come free of her back like razor blades, up alongside her spine.

It’s still laughing. Laughing, laughing, and it yanks itself away from her, and her hand lets the branch go. The momentum still pulls her forward, the hand buried in her until the last second. She watches it hit the ground, the branch still embedded in its chest. The fire is starting to catch, the skin melting off, and the laugh is slowly starting to turn into a dying shriek.

“Wrong move,” it laughs, voice breaking off into an odd sort of wheeze, before it starts shrieking again.

She tries to keep her feet under her, even as she stumbles forward, and it doesn’t work. She hits the slope of the hill and then the ground. Her whole body spasms when she does, and when she reaches down towards her stomach she can feel all the way inside, her hands slippery with her own blood.

She’s still sliding, even though the hill is hardly a hill at all. It breaks into a sharp angle at the last second and she goes tumbling to the bottom of it.

She hits rocks, and then lands halfway in the creek.

Because that’s what she needed right now.

It’s shallow, nearing dry because of the heat of summer, but it still soaks into her back and along her hairline regardless. It’s freezing, when everything else is burning. The undergrowth all along the hill and up above it is going up in flames, along with the body. The shrieking has stopped, but someone else is screaming.

Tanis. It has to be Tanis. Rooke hasn’t gotten her away yet. Why hasn’t he—

She tries to move and can’t.

It’s like her body’s paralyzed. Maybe the talons clipped her spine and severed something along the way. She can hardly feel anything, except for her prodding fingers inside her own stomach, trying to coax her insides back where they belong.

And that feeling of death, creeping back in.

It really has been twenty years. She had thought she was doing good, that she could set a new record for herself.

But that’s not happening. She can feel everything changing. The signs are recognizable, of the blackness coming to claim her. How quiet everything gets. How everything fades to the same shade of gray, in the seconds before.

The fire is plunging down the hill. It’s going to catch her in the legs. That’s good. If she goes up with it, her body will be reduced to ash. She’ll come back faster, instead of waiting for mother nature to take it’s time on her corpse.

She presses her hand over the bloody, gaping wound in her stomach, and the pain ripples through her again, already dull. She still can’t move her legs, and the terror of that fades away, like the creek is carrying it away from her. The screaming up the hill has dwindled, but she can hear something else now. Choked, horrified noises that almost sound like sobs. Like someone can’t breathe.

She can still breathe, but she can hardly raise her other arm to check. The necklace is gone. She was right – it really doesn’t do any good. Wherever it is now, lost in the undergrowth, it never saves anyone.

The fire is at the bottom of the hill. She feels it lick up against the soles of her shoes, but the burn of it is familiar. The scent of it in the air, body longing to return to ash once again.

Where it belongs.

Just when she was starting to think she might belong somewhere else, too.

—

—

—

Blair has only one question for whatever human invented such a long driveway, and that question is _why._

He’s not sure the steps he’s taking are really considered progress. He’s not even really lifting his feet off the ground, just proceeding forward in odd, shuffling little motions that seemed a lot easier than walking, at first, and now just seem like a drag.

Which they technically are.

He can see the house. It just seems much further away than it actually is. He’s not quite so cold anymore. It just kind of feels like he’s burning now, an incessant itch in the pit of his stomach that won’t go away.

His eyes are trying to close too, mid-walk. Not blackout level, this time. He doesn’t think he’s ever felt this exhausted in his life, like someone made him their own personal punching bag for about two straight weeks and then expected him to pick himself back up.

His white shirt is no longer white. Whether that’s a testament to the time or the ditch he spent three days in, he’s not sure.

The incline to the last quarter of the drive is the worst of all, but the front door opens before he even starts on it. Vance only takes a single step out to look at him, still holding onto the door.

Blair very slowly trickles to an uneasy halt. He really didn’t think any of this through, beyond getting up the driveway. He’s not sure what he’s meant to do now. Just get back here. That’s all he was thinking.

Vance is about to open his mouth and say something – a terrible ice breaker, probably, when Dimara nudges him out of the way to clear a path for her. Where Vance doesn’t move she starts down the drive towards him with zero hesitation. He almost takes a step back. There’s nothing he can say, nothing he can do. He has answers, now, but not the right ones.

“Fuck’s sake,” she snaps, and the anger is something he expected, but the sheer aggression in the way she grabs at him and then suddenly has her arms around him is something he didn’t see coming.

He’s shocked as his own willingness to lean into her so easily, because even though she’s not holding any of his weight it feels like she’s helping him stand regardless. She tightens her arms around his back and he lets his head fall onto her shoulder, eyes already only half-open.

“Are you okay?” she asks, and he shakes his head. He feels her arms tighten. “What can I do?”

“This is good.”

He can’t remember the last time someone honest to god hugged him and meant well from it. What a far cry the two of them are, from the day when he was on the porch begging her to let him in. He doesn’t even remember being that person.

She holds onto him for quite a while, until he forces himself to look up. Vance is still at the door, and Tanis has crept up beside him, still half in the house. She doesn’t look near as awful as he feels, but she doesn’t look great either. Almost like she’s been crying, but he’s not able to wrap his brain around that particular image before Dimara pulls back, hanging onto his shoulders.

“Did you not eat the entire time you were gone?” she asks, and he shakes his head again. Maybe that’s the burn he’s starting to feel in his stomach. Maybe he’s just dying. Who knows.

“You’re so fucking stupid,” she hisses, which is fair. He agrees with her on that.

His own stupidity doesn’t outweigh the fact that she’s looking at him with a terribly large amount of pity in her eyes, something he stares at for a heartbeat before she pulls him back down, and he can’t make himself fight it. This is safety. Almost like the safety he has memories of, except not quite.

“Tanis told us,” Dimara says quietly. “About everything. Everything she knew, anyway.”

So, everyone knows. That’s fantastic, and not something he was equipped to deal with right away. He’s not even sure he’s equipped to deal with Nadir, even though he has to. By now he would have expected her to be on him the same way Dimara already is, but she’s nowhere in sight.

“I need to talk to her,” he mumbles into Dimara’s shoulder, and he feels her tense.

“I need to tell you something,” she says quietly. “But you need to promise me you’re not going to lose it.”

This time he’s the one to pull back, hoping something in her face will give it away. She looks exhausted. Again, not as much as him, but her eyes are shadowed, hair a mess, shoes splattered all over with thick droplets of mud.

“What?”

Her arms fall away from him, finally. She goes scrounging deep into her pocket, hand emerging with something he doesn’t see for a moment until she sees her fingers. The necklace is dangling out from between them, the clasp twisted into two different pieces, the cross still swinging off it.

That was his. The same necklace that Nadir had been so reluctant to let go of, even until he took off on her.

“Why do you have that?” he asks, voice strained.

“Something happened last night,” she tells him. “Vance had been going out every night, looking for you. Last night Nadir, Tanis and Rooke went instead, around midnight. They got back a half hour later. Something attacked them. Rooke said it was a demon, or at least it looked like one. Nadir killed it.”

He almost expects it, the way she trails off into silence. He holds out his hand and she drops the necklace into it. When he closes his fingers around it, it presses so hard into his skin that it hurts, threatening to draw blood.

“Nadir killed it,” she repeats. “But it killed her.”

He was expecting it. Thought, somehow, that he was prepared to hear the words come out of Dimara’s mouth.

But he’s not.

“Where is she?”

“We don’t know—”

“How do you - how do you not _fucking know_?”

“Listen to me,” she insists. “I went back this morning. That’s when I found the necklace. Both of the bodies are gone. Tanis said that’s a good thing. If her body’s gone, that means she’s already… regenerated, I guess, somewhere else. But we don’t know where, or when she’ll come back.”

 _Or if she will_. He’s pretty sure if he looks down his heart’s going to be in the middle of the driveway, blood splattered all over his shoes.

“You don’t— you don’t know that she’s coming back. You don’t have any way to tell.”

“She’ll come back,” Dimara says quietly, and he shakes his head. That’s all he’s capable of doing anymore. That’s all he’s programmed to do.

She reaches out a hand for his arm again, and he takes a step back. He feels the cross slice into his palm, finally, and even the tiniest flash of pain isn’t enough to take away from the panic he suddenly feels crushing his chest.

“Don’t run,” she pleads. “Not again.”

He can’t run.

He can’t run, but he’s up through the front door before she can even think to grab at him.

Vance hauls Tanis out of the way a second before he gets there. Tanis, who still looks like she’s about to curl up in a corner and cry. Tanis who was out there last night, when Nadir—

He’s got a clear path to the stairs. He gets up onto the second floor with no interference and has himself behind Rooke’s door a second later He slams it shut, and the entire wall shakes. He doesn’t really remember sinking to the floor but he’s certainly there, a place he’s become quite familiar with the past two weeks. The footsteps coming up the stairs after him make him reach up to lock the door, and it clicks shut a second before Dimara tries to open it.

“Blair,” she starts, but he hardly hears her. So, this is what a peak meltdown looks like.

He’s not sure, if vampires can even _have_ panic attacks. He won’t die from a stab wound, or a bullet, or a dozen other things normal people do. He doesn’t get sick. He doesn’t need to sleep.

But it feels like he’s about to have a panic attack.

For someone who’s not breathing, the sudden lack of air is terrifying. His chest feels like it’s about split open, which won’t kill him either. He almost wishes it could. That would be easier, than being here right now. Than existing.

And Nadir might not, right now. She might never set foot in here ever again.

The last thing he did was run away from her. In what he’ll call the _before_ the last thing he did was dare to walk towards her, before he got himself killed.

Neither of those things matter anymore.

If he hasn’t been hugged in a long time, then he hasn’t cried for even longer. Perhaps all the way back to the days when he was still human, but even then, he can’t recall a time. Maybe there’s still holes in his memory. Maybe his brain is trying to keep him safeguarded against something that will only wind up hurting him. If he felt safe with her, in her arms, then maybe it wasn’t always like that. Maybe he was terrified, sometimes. Maybe she knows when he cried, when he doesn’t.

Except he knows it right now.

Crying doesn’t even present itself as an option. His body gives up suddenly, out of the blue, refusing to keep anything in for a moment longer. He was bound to collapse, eventually. But he can’t breathe, knees curled up to his chest, and there are tears streaming down his face, and the steady _drip drip_ of his blood onto the floor is a miracle.

It means he’s still alive.

But the cross cutting into his skin isn’t enough of a toll. It doesn’t hurt nearly enough. Something should be punishing him harder than this, making him atone for everything that led to this moment. For letting this happen. For forgetting in the first place.

For running when he shouldn’t have.

He’s alive, by some grace of gods that he still can’t convince himself exist.

He’s alive – but he’s realized something.

He doesn’t know if there’s much point to even being alive, if she’s not.

—

—

—

Nadir never wakes up the same way twice.

She’s woken up screaming. She’s woken up in the middle of a street, and the middle of a snowbank. She’s woken up in an entirely different country, twelve hours away by non-stop flight.

She dares to crack her eyes open, and she’s staring at a very dull yellow ceiling, riddled with water stains. Even her dizzy, confusion-riddled brain recognizes that fact.

Well. It’s not the worst predicament she’s ever woken up in.

It’s definitely a motel room. That, or a very rundown hotel. There’s the bed that she’s laying on. An old television propped up on the desk in front of it. The armchair is so musty you couldn’t pay her to sit in it if her life depended on it. And that’s it. The curtains are tightly shut, allowing her no insight as to what’s on the other side.

She eases herself off to the side of the bed, slowly. Her legs are still numb, almost, but she can wiggle all her toes just fine, and she lets out a sigh of relief. She presses her hand over her stomach, and even though she already knows it the lack of distinctive holes is quite nice to feel.

She’s got clothes on, which is equally nice. Again, not the worst predicament she’s ever woken up in. No shoes. Nothing she had on her when she died, phone included. That’s two in a month, now.

She stands up and begins to inch towards the door, quickly unlatching the deadbolt. The sunlight that spills through the meager cracks turns her vision white for a second, and she blinks frantically. Even before she can properly see she can hear the busy rush of cars racing past, and her eyes land on the freeway, just outside of the parking lot. It’s definitely a motel. An old one. There are a few cars in the lot, a semi-truck pulled around the side. Two very small stores across the street.

That’s it.

But all of the vehicles have United States license plates, at least. The truck is Oregon, but three of the cars are Texas, and the fourth Mississippi. So at least she's somewhere semi-familiar.

Regardless of how she wakes up, there’s always one deadly question: how the fuck does she get out of here? Wherever _here_ even is. It’s hotter than what hell must feel like, the sun beating down relentlessly. She eyes the front office, hardly ten paces away.

She’s still got no shoes on, but she also doesn’t have a better idea.

She quickly slips out of the room, trying to seem nonchalant. Casual. Like she absolutely paid for that room and just didn't accidentally wake up in it. Appearance-wise she's not sure she'll be able to nail that, but she at least has to try.

The bell to the office jingles obnoxiously. There's a little section of wall of hiding the front desk from view, and she peers around it. There's a very old little woman behind the counter, on the phone, who eyeballs her the second she steps inside. It's very small and cramped, a few stands of pamphlets on the windowsill. She picks the first one in reach up, all the while feeling the woman's eyes on the back of her head.

Alexandria Zoological Park. Louisiana?

She almost wants to laugh at how bad that hurts.

It wasn't Alexandria back then, not even close. It's not going to look like anything she remembers, save for the river, and what's left of the land. There was nothing that ever tempted her to come back, after everyone she knew here finally passed.

Whatever's at work in the universe here, it's almost kind of touching.

Because this place is her and Blair to it's very core. It's the place that held them, for several years. Where everything terrible happened, once upon a time.

The phone slams down. "Can I help you, Miss?"

She looks over her shoulder. The lady looks very, very suspicious of her. Nadir can't say she blames her for that.

"No, I'm good. Thank-you."

"Did you stay here last night?"

No point in lying. "Yes."

"What room number?"

Well, Nadir definitely didn't think to look before she walked over here, so that's not happening. She's definitely not anywhere in this lady's system either, so no point in asking that.

That doesn't leave much to say.

"Listen," she starts. "I don't need anybody in here causing ruckus. Especially not anybody that's not human. I'll call the cops, if you—"

And that's her cue to go. Old ladies have become particularly vicious, lately. Apparently, tolerance still isn't their thing.

She rounds the wall. The phone starts ringing off the hook again. She pauses. The woman turns to grab it again. Nadir can hardly see her, just her back as she swivels the chair around to grab it. She can see over the desk, just the slightest bit. Cups full of pens and the very old computer and the lady's purse, sitting just at the edge.

The lady gets up, taking the phone with her. Disappears from view. Nadir kicks the door all the way open, so the bells jingle wildly. It's a convincing enough exit. So much so that the lady has no qualms about leaving the office, now that she's gone.

It takes all of two seconds for her to reach over the desk, hand in the lady's purse. There's not much else in it, save for the wallet. It's a good thing that's all she wants.

She doesn't go out of her way to do things like this. She saves that for people who burn her house down or random creatures that attack her in the woods, not old ladies. Usually, anyway. But right now, she needs to leave this place, and she needs to get back home.

And hopefully it'll be a few hours, before she even notices.

She slips back out the door before it's even closed, back outside.

Yeah, she really needs to get out of here.

And she needs to find some shoes.

—

—

—

It doesn't actually take her that long, to get situated.

The motel isn't in the most convenient of places, but a few exits down the freeway a plaza and cluster of shops appears, and it's not hard to fix herself up.

If she gets a handful of looks for the whole lack of shoes deal, she can live with it.

Shoes are first, followed by an actual viable change of clothes, and a backpack that she stuffs full of assorted drinks and snacks. Money acquired or not, it's still going to be several days before she gets anywhere close to home.

The cashier gives her a bit of a look, when she pays for her stuff, changes into it all in the bathroom, and then comes back out to ask him where the bus depot is.

But he tells her. That's all that matters.

The river is still very much the same, pushed up along the downtown area. It's almost kind of a shame that the bus depot isn't far away, or else she'd stay here for a bit. But she's got an old lady who's probably going to be calling the cops on her, soon, and not a ton of time to waste.

But she thinks she might come back one day, when everything's calmed down.

It's a miracle that there's a small, abandoned self-serve kiosk inside the front doors of the depot, because she doesn't think there's a chance in hell the guy behind the counter will believe the fact that she's _Barbara Hudson._ She's only really got one option. Take a bus to New Orleans. Switch buses there. Make three overnight stops – Alabama, New York, and Boston – before she hits Portland.

That's a few days travel. This day almost fully wasted.

It's better than nothing.

—

—

—

Alabama has too many people in it.

She's completely unwilling to venture out of the depot, so she sleeps on a bench near the back exit. Or at least tries to. That's about the time she starts wondering about what's happening back home.

There's a lot. She doesn't even know if Tanis and Rooke made it back out of the woods, same with the necklace. She has no way to know if Blair ever came back, or what's happening there now.

For all her scouring she doesn't produce a single piece of change from the lady's wallet, to find a payphone. What kind of old lady doesn't have any change?

Probably the same kind that lets their wallet get stolen when they turn around.

It's because of the wallet that she's not about to ask anyone for a cell phone, either. Even though she's pretty sure her death records go back hundreds of years, she's not about to chance someone tracking her down because a random stranger tipped them off.

She sleeps easier on the bus than when she's stopped. She hears it pull up at six in the morning and only looks forward to getting back on it.

It's easier than thinking about anything else.

—

—

—

Nadir gets off the bus in New York City, refills her bag, and pitches the wallet into the Hudson.

She tries not to feel satisfied, at the irony.

—

—

—

She actually likes Boston, quite a bit.

She lived up in New England for several years, before she died in 1712 and got tossed to the opposite coast.

Moving back home wasn't quite as easy as it is now. Back then when she died she didn't have much of a choice, to stay where she next woke up, until she got her bearings once again.

Maybe it's because Boston reminds her of Portland, just the slightest bit. The ocean and the streets and all the people. She can't find the spot where she used to live but looking at the water she knows she's close enough.

She almost doesn't stay overnight. It's only about a two-hour drive from here. If she still had the wallet, she'd be in a rental car by now, long gone. But there's no one here to take her any further except the bus driver, fast asleep in some hotel by now until five.

She gets a real, solid night's sleep. First one in a while. Ignoring the fact that she sleeps in the depot again and gets terrible coffee just before the bus shows up, it's not that bad. Maybe because she knows how close to home she really is.

The bus ride feels like it takes two days, not two hours. Her seatmate sleeps the whole time, and she wonders how the girl is doing it.

Clearly whatever she's headed towards isn't as important.

There's half a dozen stops all over Portland. She waits until the last one, as close to the edge of the city as she can get. It'll still take her at least an hour to get back to the house from this point, but an hour, after all of this? That's nothing.

She never really appreciated this place before. She doesn't really have homes, she just has in-betweens. Tanis' little cabin was the closest she got, in a long time, but now she has the real deal.

It doesn't look any different. The trees are all the same, the thick green canopy still as impenetrable as ever. All the birds are still out, this early in the morning. It's warm, but not unpleasantly so; the breeze shifting gently over her and back again. She's basically got the contents of a grocery store shoved into her backpack, enough water to last her six months.

She didn't realize just how isolated the house was, either. There's nothing else on the main road for several miles, and it ends just after their turnoff, the woods the only thing in sight. She can no longer smell the acrid scent of something burning, of the woods going up in flames around her, on top of her.

That's a relief.

The biggest relief is the driveway, and the morning sun reflecting back off it. Everything's the same. The car is still parked alongside the house, her bike just beyond it. The meadow is in full bloom in the early August warmth, flashes of purple and yellow dotted all throughout the grass.

It wasn't those woods that killed her. They're not the bad thing.

It's still early, so she's not surprised by the silence. She steps up on porch, equally unsurprised to find the door unlocked. They've got a bad habit, of dealing with frightening things and then doing nothing to combat it.

The one surprising thing is Tanis, asleep on the couch. It looks like she's been there a while. Nadir knows just from looking at her that the past few days have been downright miserable. Not that they haven't been miserable for her too, but at least she knew she was coming back. No one here had any way to tell that. She never called them to even let them know she was okay; that wasn't exactly one of the options she had.

Everyone, for once, seems to be getting an appropriate amount of sleep. She toes her shoes off, silently, and leaves her backpack at the door before going over to crouch down at Tanis' side.

She reaches forward and very gently taps her on the arm.

Sue her, alright? It's been this long, she should enjoy herself a little bit.

With everything that's happened, she'd expect Tanis to bolt awake. She has to tap her arm again before she even stirs, and it takes her a few seconds to crack her eyes open. Nadir sees the realization, the shock, but that doesn't stop her from cracking a smile.

"Why are you sleeping on the couch?" she asks, amused.

Tanis gasps, sort of. It's hard to tell when two seconds later Tanis launches herself forward, arms around her so tight that it hurts. Nadir has to channel all her energy on keeping the two of them upright, because Tanis certainly isn't.

"Hi," she laughs, and Tanis squeezes her.

"You are such an asshole," she accuses, but her voice is thick. "Where were you?"

"Dealing with a good old dose of modern southern hospitality. But I'm back now."

Tanis nods. She's freaked out. She's never seen her cry, never seen her freak out about someone else without denying it a second later. She squeezes her back.

"Are you okay?"

"Why are you asking me that? You're the one that _died."_

"That was the goal," she mutters, regardless of relief, and Tanis pinches her. "As long as you're fine. Is Rooke okay?"

"Haven't seen him much."

That's about what Nadir expected, at least when it comes to Rooke. At least he hasn't outright disappeared. Tanis is shaking a little, a dose of fear in her that wasn't there before, but she is too. Just from the sheer relief of being back behind this door. From having one less thing to deal with.

Tanis pulls back and sets to wiping at her face. It doesn't look like she's crying now, but you never know.

"That was the worst way to be woken up," Tanis complains, and she cracks a smile.

"You mean the best."

Tanis rolls her eyes but relaxes back into the couch. "Missed you. Think someone else did too."

She waits for the very typical, teasing look to appear on Tanis' face, but it doesn't. That coupled with the fear and the near-appearance of tears is enough to make her realize just how fucked up everything still must be.

"He's back?"

She nods. "Showed up the morning after."

Again, with the irony. "Is _he_ okay?"

"Dimara told him as soon as he got back. He freaked, which we expected him to, but he got upstairs and locked himself away before anyone got to him. He's alive, we know that. But nobody's seen him. He won't open the damn door."

"It's been five days," she says slowly. "And he hasn't come out?"

She shakes her head. "We don't think so. And he didn't eat anything the whole time he was gone, and if he hasn't crept out when we we're sleeping then that's what, almost three weeks?"

Pretty damn close. Not a breaking point but approaching one. She can't imagine him having willingly gone three weeks without. She realized it was bad, but not like this. Not to the point where he completely gave up on taking care of himself, even in the slightest bit.

"Hey," Tanis says. "If anyone's gonna get through to him, it'll be you. Right?"

That's what she'd like to believe. If Blair really did react violently to all of this, then clearly he feels something, no matter what it is. Something's finally become clear in his head.

There's a ton of things she can hope for, but she's not going to be that optimistic yet.

Clearly optimism is getting them nowhere.

—

—

—

No one else reacts quite as wildly as Tanis did, but she wouldn't expect them to.

Rory's the one first to come crawling out of his room, and he's halfway down the stairs before he notices her sitting there. He proceeds to trip down the last three steps and wake half the house up in his quest to save himself.

It makes her realize something. She's never really had anyone waiting for her to come back before. There was never another person waiting for her with open arms, no one to ask her what happened, or where she ended up, or if she's okay in the here and now.

And every single one of them does it, at some point in the day. In different ways and at different times, but each one of them she makes sure to actually treasure, instead of just throwing them all away.

Thing is, there was never anyone _to_ go back to. She didn't like getting attached, when she knew what was going to happen down the line.

Blair was the exception to the rule. The one thing that she got into with no way out in sight, and even then, she couldn't bring herself to care.

Because it felt right. And not much did, at that point.

There's still no sign of him. If what Tanis said really is true, then he'd have come out by now. He must know she's here, somehow. That fact only makes it sting more, even if she knows deep down that she's being ridiculous.

She's not giving him a reason to come out. No one is.

To be honest, she just wants to sleep. But even sleep isn't more tempting than creeping up to the closed, locked bedroom door, long after everyone else drops off.

She stands there silently, even though she's not going to hear anything he doesn't want her to. She's not Vance.

But no one else is here.

"Blair," she calls softly, already knowing it's pointless. If everyone else has been trying to talk to him for days, then she's probably not any different. The trouble comes with them both knowing she is. She sits down with a thud, back against the door.

He can't stay in there forever. He'll starve himself out, which won't end well for anyone in this house, or he'll cave.

Right now, she's betting on the fact that he has to cave.

"Sorry's not going to cut it for either of us," she says quietly. "And I'm not saying anything else to a door."

If anything, she's hoping he'll appreciate honesty. If he's even bothering to listen.

At least sleeping here, up against the door, is better than sleeping in a random bus depot for another night. Not much can be worse than that, with so many random, prying eyes around. At least here she knows she's safe, and it's where she belongs.

She must doze off at some point, because her eyes snap open as she starts to tilt dangerously to the floor. She steadies herself and pushes back up, until she's righted once again. At least her eyes don't feel quite so heavy anymore.

Something behind her shifts. She goes abnormally still.

The door hasn't opened at all, but she swore she heard something. A foot sliding across the ground, hardly audible at all unless it was something you were looking to hear. She doesn't even want to open her mouth or move in the slightest. Because she's scared that she'll scare him off, if it really is him? Possibly. She's grown used to the feeling of having to hold her breath.

The lock clicks.

She quite possibly feels like she's about to die again.

She waits, but nothing else happens.

There's not even the faintest peep, either. It's times like these when she wishes deeply to have some sort of ability other than the fire, and the whole coming back to life business.

Not that she's ungrateful for that.

She rises to her feet, all four limbs protesting at the action, and gently tests the handle. It turns easily enough, no resistance at all.

Just because he didn't come out doesn't mean anything.

He's letting her in, instead.

—

—

—

Blair had become quite content with the idea that he was going to fuse to the bed.

No one would be able to pry him off, if he spent days on end letting it absorb him. That was probably for the best.

Until she got back, anyway.

He heard it. He heard it before anyone else did, guaranteed. In the first second he wanted to be downstairs before anyone else even knew. In the next he was making himself stop. Three later and he was back in the bed, unwilling to move because he knew going down didn't just mean her. It meant everyone else.

He heard her come up, too. With the ache and burn of hunger comes the brief heightening of the senses, before everything goes downhill. He's not sure what finally possesses him to get up and unlock the door, but he does it. Quickly, and back into the bed before she so much as moves. That's where he's been, since he picked himself up off the floor.

And even Rooke hasn't popped in to harass him out of it.

The door opens. He's already got his eyes closed, an arm thrown over his face, curled back up where it's easiest.

She doesn't say anything. He's not sure what she would say, if she dared to.

The door closes, and again with the lock. Well, at least she's being courteous.

It takes her a while before she moves any closer to him. If it was anyone else, he'd assume it was fear. Fear of the hunger taking over, of the bloodlust. But that's not what she's scared of, when she sits down gingerly just at the edge of the bed.

They're scared of a lot of things. Just not each other.

He can feel her eyes on him, watchful as always. Constantly flitting back and forth between him and somewhere safer, like the wall. He’s not looking back at her, can’t quite bring himself to just yet, but he understands her hesitance.

“I am sorry,” she starts. “For dropping it on you like that.”

The biggest question in his mind is if he would have remembered, had she not told him. Maybe he would only have ever half-remembered things and wouldn’t obtain the full picture. He would have wanted it, if he hadn’t. That means taking the good, the bad, and the ugly, and all the pain-induced blackouts that come along with it.

He may have had all that, but at least he didn’t die.

“I know this will probably be hilarious to you, considering everything you’ve been put through,” she says. “But even seeing you was hard. When you showed up I just – I didn’t expect that. I spent so many years telling myself to get over it. Apparently not enough. I knew that you wouldn’t ever remember, that it wouldn’t matter.”

That last bit is funnier than the rest. No one, not a single person in this world, would have expected him to remember. Least of all him. And if he had known the pain that came along with it, he probably would have accepted knowing nothing.

Going back to that now isn’t an option. Not one he’d want to take, anyway.

He can hear everything. Her uneasy shift, the slight hitch of her breath as she contemplates what else to say.

“You don’t know this,” she says quietly. “But I was the one that found you.”

He opens his eyes.

She’s facing away from him, eyes fixed on some random point next to the door. Both of her hands are locked around the edge of the bed, holding on too tight.

“I found you,” she repeats. “When you didn’t show up I went looking for you. And even from a distance I _knew_ , I knew that you were dead, but it didn’t matter. I must have been making a hell of a racket, because someone dragged me off of you. And I hardly fucking remember any of it now, but they took you off, and someone gave me all of your stuff a few hours later, what was left of it, and I had to go track down your brother—”

That hitch in her breath wasn’t nerves. It’s the sound of someone dangerously close to tears. He skipped right past that point, when he got back, and rode straight into the breakdown. But unlike him she’s trying to hold it in.

Probably for his sake.

Have they not been holding things in for long enough?

He inches his hand forward, until it slides over top of hers. She goes still.

When she looks over her shoulder at him, he forces himself to look her in the eye. After all of this, she deserves at least that.

“We’re a mess,” she tells him, and he nods in agreement. She flips her hand over, so that their fingers are properly tangled together.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs.

“What could you possibly be sorry for at this point?”

A lot of things, none of which she’s going to accept. He doesn’t want to fight with her now. Or ever, preferably, if he gets that choice.

“Not for the reason you think. I just – sorry that you had to go through that, I guess.”

“That’s what I deserved, honestly, for not protect—”

“You can’t protect everyone.”

“I didn’t _have_ to protect everyone,” she insists. “I just had to protect you. It didn’t work then, and it’s not working now.”

He really did feel safe with her, whether she thought she was protecting him or not. He always did. Maybe some secret part of his brain knew what she was even then and recognized it. Maybe that’s why he died in the first place.

“You know,” he says. “Maybe it’s a good thing you screwed up on your protection detail. I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t. That’s a good thing, right?”

“Are you actually enjoying having this conversation right now?”

He kind of is, to be honest. It’s a surprise even to himself. All the pain in his head has been reduced to a very dull ache, almost to the point where he can push it back even further and ignore it. And it hasn’t flared back up again, with her here.

She turns around, and let’s go of his hand to do it, until she’s sitting cross-legged beside him, still looking down. She almost hesitates, he can tell, before she grabs his hand to intertwine their fingers once again.

He begins to push himself up to sit in front of her. Truthfully, his body aches more than his head does at this point. From his almost complete lack of movement, he reckons. His fault. But that doesn’t mean he has to like it. He lowers his head into his free hand once he’s finally sitting up, letting his eyes blink open and shut slowly. He’s not surprised to feel her hand find his shoulder, fingers curling around the back of his neck.

“How’s it going up there?”

“Fine.”

“Is it really?”

He nods, but that doesn’t stop him from leaning back into the fingers pressing gently into his skin, alleviating some of the pressure.

“I’m scared,” he reveals.

“Of what?”

“I have all these fucking emotions now. And memories and revelations and feelings and all these things I wasn’t prepared for, and sometimes if I try and think too long and hard about it all my brain just collapses. And I feel the need to say something stupid or do something stupid. Anything stupid, really.”

They could probably both make jokes about that, about his inability to be a walking hazard to himself and anyone that chooses to spend time with him.

Or maybe not. She doesn’t look like she was about to insult him.

“Then do something stupid.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Don’t say what?”

“Don’t say that like, like you’re offering to let me do something idiotic with no repercussions. That’s not smart.”

“Less smart than trying to starve yourself?”

Well, he doesn’t have a quick retort for that one. He knows that’s been the main concern of everyone in the house, while she’s been gone. And clearly, it’s one of hers too, or else she wouldn’t have brought it up.

“You go long enough, and it starts to hurt. And that pain was easier than dealing with everything else.”

The pain of remembering all of this, of realizing she was gone just when he wanted her back. He hadn’t been ready for how crushed he felt, in that moment. At how upset Dimara had looked for him, about him, at him. Just too much sorrow and despondency altogether, pointed at him.

Which is kind of how Nadir’s looking at him right now.

He squeezes his eyes shut and she inches forward until he realizes where she’s going with this. He tugs his hand out of her grip so that he can lean forward into her, face finding a very convenient home in the front of her shoulder, arms pressing tight around the small of her back. She’s not holding onto him quite as tight, but her fingers are still kneading gentle circles into the base of his neck and her other hand is brushing gently over his back.

It’s the first time in a long while, where it feels like he can release a very long, shaky breath and won’t immediately die for it.

“Do you want me to go get you some?”

Blood would involve the prospect of her leaving, which he’s not a fan of. He shakes his head. That would mean letting go. He’s gone longer than this. Never in the arms of someone else, a human body running full of blood just in front of him, but he feels no urge. No rising threat.

“Is this weird to you?” he mumbles.

“Should it be?”

He shrugs, as much as he can. “Was just wondering. ‘Cause it doesn’t feel weird to me, even though I feel like it should. I just feel like…”

“Like what?”

Again, with resorting to wanting to say things he shouldn’t. At this point, he should just stop talking altogether. He’s on a roll now, though. There’s not much _stop_ involved.

“I had a dream last night,” he tells her.

“What was it about?”

Well, now she’s just entertaining him. “I haven’t – I haven’t had a dream that I’ve remembered since I died. Maybe it’s a weird vampire side-effect, I don’t know. But it was less like a dream and more like I was just living a memory. I was human, very happily so, and I remember feeling warm for once in my goddamn life, and you were there, and I know for a fact that I was in love with you, and I’m kinda still feeling that way now except my brain feels like a plate of scrambled eggs.”

He swears he feels her smile, against the top of his head. “I don’t have any memories of this much rambling.”

He’s never heard a more obvious cover-up in his life. Someone else, anyone else, would miss the slight shakiness in her voice, but there are no tears to accompany it this time. That’s something daringly hopeful, something he doesn’t think she’s felt in a very long time.

Because he hasn’t felt it either.

“Think I’m just tired,” he says weakly, which is second on the list, below her response. He is tired, beyond tired, but that’s not it.

“Did you not sleep the entire time you were gone?”

“Does blacking out in a ditch for three days count?”

She frowns, very obviously so. “You should go to sleep.”

He should. He wants to. He closes his eyes against her, even though he could hardly see anything as is. His body is just dead weight, at this point. He’s still hungry and he absolutely has not showered off all the grime he acquired outside, and if she’s upset by that she’s not telling him.

There’s a lot of signs pointing to the fact that she wants to let go of him as little as he wants to let go of her. He’s not being very useful in his quest to lean against her forever, but she’s not making it very difficult. He feels so much more relaxed already.

She sighs. “Blair, I didn’t mean on me. You’re going to kill my back.”

He grumbles something and pulls away so that he can toss himself back horizontally into the bed as dramatically as he can possibly manage, in his half-gone state. Her knees are still brushing up against his legs.

“Are you staying?” he asks.

“Do you want me to?”

He’s taking up pretty much every inch of the bed save for the corner she’s sitting on. He drags all four limbs back up closer to himself to give her some room, and she lays down next to him, albeit more gently. It’s not very hard, to be gentler than he is about things.

He doesn’t stop himself from curling closer to her, not when she offers an arm out the second she’s situated, a place for him to rest his head. Her hand settles over his neck again, fingers edging into the hair at the base of his skull, feather-soft.

She’s tracing down his arm with the other hand, looking just as exhausted as he feels.

“Where’d you end up?”

“Alexandria.”

“Virginia?”

“Louisiana.”

“No, you didn’t,” he mumbles. “Stop fucking with me when I’m tired.”

She laughs. “I’m not. Swear.”

“How was it?”

“Boring. You weren’t there.”

“Isn’t everything boring without me?”

She sighs, regardless of the amused smile he can feel just out of his range of vision. He’s so warm right now he could probably die happy, although he doesn’t think Nadir would agree with that sentiment the same way he does. He’s ice and she’s fire and he can’t help but think it’s always been that way, even when he was still human. Even when he didn’t know a single thing.

“See you in the morning,” she murmurs, and her lips are very soft against the edge of his temple where they brush over his skin. It doesn’t feel quite as daunting, then, to let himself slip back into the darkness of sleep.

And he swears he can still feel her holding onto him, even when he does.

—

—

—

The necklace is the first thing Nadir sees, when she wakes.

It’s strewn out across the bedside table, the cross gleaming half gold, half red. She wishes she could reach forward and grab it, but that would mean moving. And she doesn’t really have that option.

She’s not so much curled around him as they are around each other. She’s hardly moved all night, it seems, but Blair’s somehow managed to get closer. His arm is pressed all along her side, one leg slotted between hers, ankles hooked. She can’t even see him, but she can feel him buried in the side of her neck, nose pressed exactly where her pulse comes through strongest against her skin.

That doesn’t worry her, like it would anyone else.

There’s a creak outside the door, and she pauses, unable to turn around.

“It’s just Vance.”

She jolts, and swears she hears Blair make a sound of complaint, immediately after he says the words. The sound of his voice so sudden and so close to her after the initial silence wakes her up, if nothing else would.

“Making sure we’re both still alive?”

“Probably,” he says, and then proceeds to burrow back in again, falling silent. The creaking out in the hallway fades away.

She stares at the necklace, and then looks down at the top of his head. There’s a lot of things she’s wondering about, but only one thing that’s certain. One thing that still remains true, no matter how many hundreds of years threaten to pass.

“Blair.”

He hums something against her collarbone. Doesn’t move.

“Blair, look at me.”

Blair makes an annoyed noise once again, half-muffled by the pillow, and then ducks his head further against her, the top of his head brushing against her chin. Refusing her like the twelve year old he hadn’t managed to shake in over two hundred years.

When he finally dares to crack open his eyes, he looks as confused as she had felt upon waking in that motel room in Alexandria, disoriented and blurred over from a too-long sleep. Not sure where he was or what was going on or how he had ended up here at all. His eyes focused, really focused, slowly on her; first on her eyes and then down to her mouth and back up to her eyes again. His face went very blank.

“You know what I’ve realized?” she asks quietly, and he swallows. His eyes are very dark. So dark that it would be impossible not to notice, even at a quick glance.

“What?”

“That there was absolutely no point in telling myself to get over it, all those years. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because when someone dies, you don’t stop loving them. Not when you loved them so much before that losing them felt like you were the one dying.”

He stares at her. She stares back. It’s hard not to, close as they may be right now. She needs him to think, really think, and not just do this because he’s laying right next to her and is still confused and doesn’t think he has another option. Just because he said he felt the desire to do something, or say something, doesn’t mean he will.

And it doesn’t mean he should have to, either.

She’s about two seconds from letting go of him, rolling out of bed, and then dying of shame in the bathroom when he grabs her.

A hand against her neck and his thumb brushing very gently against her jaw and then Blair leans in and kisses her. Very wary, hesitant, but she can feel the _want_ , the decision and the purpose behind it, his mouth against hers saying that he still had absolutely no explanation for how he ended up here but that he wasn’t exactly mad about it.

She pulls back, as few centimeters as she can, and doesn’t even get a good look at all the emotions written all over his face before he pulls her forward again, and this time it feels more insistent. He’s shaking a little, fingers trembling where they’ve landed on her skin, but there’s no question in her mind that he means it, kissing her then.

And she means it too. This kiss, everything she said before – all of it. She always has.

It doesn’t take her long, until she feels her mouth quirk up into a smile against his, and he promptly pulls back and then puts his face back into her shoulder. After a moment he slings an arm over her waist and scoots even closer, which shouldn’t be possible.

“Especially when that particular someone doesn’t even stay dead,” she finishes. His hands may be shaky, but so is her voice.

His laughter is muffled against her skin and she brings her hand up between them, to brush against what little of his face she can still see. He goes silent when the tips of her fingers skim against the veins alongside his eye, and she knows she’s not imagining that they’ve already gone darker since last night. Every day gets worse for him.

But maybe it gets better for them.

“You know you need to eat, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you wanna go downstairs, then?”

“Give me a minute.”

So she does, not that she has a choice in the matter, and for once Blair’s telling the truth, because he pulls himself away from her a minute later and then sits up with an irritated grumble, one hand still resting lightly on her leg.

She hasn’t stopped smiling.

He looks back down at her. “If you keep that smug ass smile on your face, I’m not kissing you for the rest of the day.”

“One whole day after two hundred and fifty two years? Rough.”

She can’t tell what exactly the emotion that crosses his face is supposed to be, but after a second it turns into mock annoyance, and he surges back down and clambers over her, pressing himself into her. If she had half a mind to tease him for lasting all of four and a half seconds she would, but she has much less than that when he’s kissing her. Maybe a sliver, if she’s lucky, and he’s on the fast track to dissolving even that.

She forces him back, unfortunately for the both of them. He doesn’t go very far. He leans his forehead against hers and looks down at her, and if you think she’s opposed to looping his arms around his neck and holding him there for a brief second, you’re wrong.

“We’re going downstairs,” she reminds him.

“Right.”

He pecks her on the lips once more, breaks out of her hold, and then scrambles off of her and out of the bed in two seconds flat. She doesn’t even see him open the door, but by the time she gets to her feet after him he’s already gone.

He beats her to the kitchen by a mile, apparently not encountering anyone else on the way down. By the time she gets to the bottom of the stairs he’s already rooting around in the freezer, one hand closed around a blood bag, and the other rips through the tubing at one end like paper, like it’s not there at all.

He drinks like he’s dying, which isn’t nearly funny enough to make a joke about right now. She reaches past him, fishing another one out of the freezer. God only knows there are enough in there, but he’s holding onto the one he’s got like someone’s about to take it away from him.

“Take it easy,” she says quietly, and puts a hand on his back, rooting around for the scissors with the other. She snips off the end to her own and tosses it. There’s no telling how many he’s going to go through but judging by the fact that he’s going through the first one like it’s a juice-box, they’ll probably be here for a few minutes.

Dimara rounds the corner into the kitchen a minute later and nearly walks into them. She stops herself just in time, looking back and forth between the both of them, eyes narrowed.

“Okay?” she accepts, and Blair finally finishes going through the first bag. Dimara looks it over.

“That’s gross,” Dimara decides, before she tugs it out of his hand and tosses it in the garbage, already moving out of the kitchen. Not that she expected Dimara to make a big deal out of all of this, but the normalcy is appreciated.

Blair reaches back for her, and she hands him the second one wordlessly, watching him tip it back.

You’d think it was water.

He pulls it back this time, taking a break when he’s not even a quarter of the way through it. “Remind me never to do this again.”

“Got it.”

He leans against the fridge, the sudden desperation already fading away. They’ll probably still be here for a while. Nothing’s really changed about his eyes.

She doesn’t think he sees Tanis pop in her head in, about five minutes later.

She raises her eyebrows. _Good?_ she mouths.

Nadir nods and gives her a thumbs-up. Tanis must be eyeing the hand she’s still got on his back, and never has a hand seemed so reputation-ruining. She’s always been great, at escalating things and turning them into something they’re not.

Even though this is _exactly_ what she thinks it is.

Tanis smirks, and disappears.

—

—

—

He sleeps most of the day.

She’s not really surprised. He’s got a lot of catching up to do, and he crashes on the couch not long after they finally manage to shut the freezer. Kelsea sits on him and hugs him before he falls asleep, and Celia tugs a pillow out from under him and then hits him with it, darting away before he can reach a hand out to smack her.

And she leaves him alone, for the most part.

There’s no point in her lurking around him, regardless of want, or need. His need to _sleep_ is taking center stage above all else anyway.

She finds him talking to someone else at some point in the day, cycling through nearly the entire house. It’s never for any longer than a few minutes, gone by the time she next looks in. She doesn’t actually see him alone until sometime after seven, but when she returns Rooke is sitting at the edge of the table in front of him.

“How long do you think you could actually go without eating?” Rooke asks quietly. She was kind of wondering that herself, because clearly last night he spent all his waking hours trying to hide the desperation, and they’re not even at three weeks.

The veins around his eyes are nearly gone, now. His eyes back to normal.

“If I could control it, until my body shut down, probably,” Blair shrugs. “It starts getting really bad between three and four weeks. After a month…”

After a month is something he’s experienced, unfortunately for him. And it’s not pretty.

“You okay?” she asks, and they both look up at her. Blair nods, but Rooke doesn’t.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without a sweater on,” she continues, because he doesn’t look like he’s sure what to say. He looks down at his bare arms almost self-consciously, like he had forgotten, tugging anxiously at the neckline of his t-shirt like he’s trying to pull it back up.

“Trying something new.”

“Yeah? How’s that going for you?”

“I’ll let you know.”

Regardless of how much tension she’s diffused, he still looks troubled. Confused, almost, but she doesn’t think that’s the right word. Possibly unsure of what to say.

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“I shouldn’t have left you. It couldn’t have hurt me anyway. If I had done something, it might not have killed you.”

“And I told you to go. No hard feelings.”

Sure, dying’s never pleasant, but she can’t imagine witnessing it is either. And Rooke was the one who had to drag Tanis back to the house after, the one who was left with the responsibility of waking everyone else up and relaying what had happened just outside their front door.

It’s a lot, for someone who was alone up until two months ago.

“No hard feelings,” he says after a moment, under his breath. He manages the faintest smile the more she stares, but she can tell it’s forced.

Definitely not pleasant in the slightest.

“Oh, good, you’re all in here,” Dimara interrupts, and claims a spot on the opposite couch. “We’re having a group discussion.”

“Yay,” Blair deadpans, but sits up anyway. She sits down next to him, eyeing the rather large manila envelope Dimara’s got in her hands. She kicks her feet up on the table, clearly trying to be nonchalant about all of this, but the way everyone files into the living room after her and finds their own space says otherwise. It feels more like a funeral procession.

Blair sighs, and puts his head on the back of her shoulder. Tanis nudges her so hard in the opposite arm that he nearly slips off.

“Alright, so you know about this, Nadir, but Blair, listen.” Blair reluctantly hooks his chin over his shoulder, it seems, and glares. “The cops showed up while you were gone. And considering they still haven’t found out who went all axe murderer on the town council—”

“It really is like Clue,” Kelsea says quietly, and Celia snorts.

Dimara must be very good at ignoring them all. “There’s a strong possibility, I think anyway, that we’re prime suspect number one. Especially if someone followed us here. But what you both don’t know, is that three days ago, this was on the front porch.”

She tosses the envelope at them, and Nadir hardly manages to catch it. It doesn’t feel very heavy. There’s a few leftover flakes of wax still stuck to the back, where it would typically close, and she scratches at them before she opens the envelope, pulling out a lone piece of paper.

It’s only three words, scrawled very large and hastily – _leave or die_.

“That is very melodramatic,” Blair decides, because apparently, he decides where the bar is at in terms of dramatics, in this house. He’s not wrong.

“That’s what I thought,” Dimara agrees. “But I popped the seal off without really looking at it.”

There’s something else in the bottom of the envelope, and she shakes it free. The remnants of the half-intact seal come tumbling out into her hand. It’s red, almost maroon, three coils stamped slightly off center in it.

“That, according to the internet, is a triskelion,” Dimara tells them. “Very widely known as the symbol used by the three main hunting families in Portland. Supposedly they all use different colours.”

“Who’s red?”

“No idea. There’s dozens of rogue hunters in Portland, a lot of loners or smaller groups. They don’t associate with the families. They’re untouchable. Practically sacred.”

“And they’ll kill anything regardless of what you did wrong,” Nadir finishes, and Dimara nods. And one of them, or at least a messenger, was right here on their front porch. They’re lucky only the note was left, and not something worse.

“You really think there’s no chance that someone’s screwing with us?” Rory asks.

“If the cops hadn’t shown up already, that’s what I’d think. But now…”

This is an actual threat. One that stands against their lives. And sure, maybe that doesn’t particularly scare her, but everyone else is in ten times more danger. What she thinks about this issue doesn’t matter.

“Tell me you have a plan for this,” Vance pleads.

“I do. But I don’t think anyone’s going to like it.”

Dimara says anyone, but she looks right at the two of them. She stuffs the paper back in the envelope along with the seal and tosses it back onto the table. Just when she thought all of this stupidity was over with. Just when she thought they could work on getting things to a state of normal.

“We can’t stay here,” Dimara says. “We stay here, we’re waiting for someone to come and kill us. And if Rooke was stuck in here, I wouldn’t even consider leaving, but he can come with us.”

“And go where?” Celia asks.

“I’m going to stay as close to Portland as I can, and find viable proof pointing to who did it before someone decides for good that it was us—”

“Wait, we’re splitting up?” Rory asks, cutting her off. Nadir had figured that’s where Dimara was headed, but was almost convinced it wouldn’t be true, if she didn’t have the guts to say it. She had just wanted to figure this out.

“We have actual, concrete proof of why nine people out there in the world isn’t a smart idea,” she concedes, and Dimara nods.

“We saw it already – we draw attention. People look at us. And we’re easier to track. If we split up, our trail as a group goes dead. We can hide out, lie low, until we figure this all out. Regardless of what anyone else thinks I know that’s the best option to keep all of us alive.”

“Almost all of us,” Rooke says quietly, and Blair huffs in agreement.

“Say we don’t figure it out,” Tanis says. “What then?”

That’s where the trouble comes in. There’s no guarantee that they figure this out. Even if what the demon in the forest said was true, even if it was involved along with a handful of others, where does that leave them? It’s no concrete evidence. Nothing anyone important will believe.

Blair nudges her, and she looks at him. They still have a lot of things to talk about. A lot of things to sit through and remember, conversations that will continue to last long into the night. And they may not have that time now.

Time’s tricky, for people who it has no effect on.

He’s still hooked over her shoulder, watching her carefully. The quirk of his lips isn’t very hopeful, and she understands why. After all of this, the two of them were just hoping for a break, a moment of solitude. He smiles, wryly, and there’s so many thousands of things that could be going through his head now, and she’s so grateful for it.

He’s still looking her in the eyes, when he says it.

“It doesn’t matter. Because we will.”

**Author's Note:**

> Not sure when part three will be up. Sometime in 2019, though. See you then!


End file.
